Additional Material for Fiona Hayes-Renshaw and Helen Wallace: The Council of Ministers 2nd edition
This website contains some additional information on the Council of the European Union to complement what is covered in the book. It includes a number of additional texts:
- The Rules of Procedure of the Council (2004 version) - PDF file
- Decision of 29 November 2005 laying down the population sizes of the member states for the application of the qualified majority rule (NB this is adjusted annually) - PDF file
- Order of Presidencies of the EU Council until June 2018 (Decision of 12 December 2005)
- A box on the ‘balance’ between the Council and other organs or institutions
- A sample weekly agenda of the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper).
The authors' data set on explicitly contested voting in the Council is now available as part of the excellent web site created by Daniel Naurin of the University of Gothenburg bringing together data from ours and several other studies of Research Data on the Council of the European Union. It provides a resource for other researchers working on the subject and includes more detailed background to the summary information in the volume. To go direct to our homepage on the Gothenburg site click here. The data includes both statistics in a form that hopefully others can manipulate and textual information on the subject matters and kinds of decisions at issue. We would liked to thank Daniel for a truly heroic job in developing the Research Data website.
Please note that version of Table 10.3 in the first printing of the book contains a number of errors which have been corrected in the data on the Gothenburg site. For a corrected version of that table click here.
In addition a great deal of information on the Council's current organisation and activities can be obtained from the Council's own website which is an invaluable tool for the interested observer and inquisitive researcher. This updates the details of organisation and activities as of April 2006 set out on p.353 of the book. The names and telephone numbers of relevant officials can be obtained from the online Official Institutional Directory of the EU Idea. Under the Council's transparency rules some documents are directly available online and for others a special request has to be made. For details see the page on Access to Council Documents. Also available via the Council website is the website of the current presidency which is another useful sources of information on work in progress.
