Overview

International organisations like the European Union (EU) are thought to play a fundamental role in international negotiations by providing a venue of information exchange, reducing transaction costs, and facilitating agreements between members states. Up until this point in time, very little attention has been paid to the manner in which information flows between different actors involved in the legislative process within the Council of the European Union. This project examines the information flows between actors and committees in the Council of Ministers of the EU during legislative negotiations, based on data collected from consilium.europa.eu covering 1998-2013. We provide an account of the network that emerges from the flow of information between actors, and the relative centrality of different actors and committees within this network, using visualisation tools and methodologies from the field of social network analysis.

About

This project is a collaboration between James P. Cross, Lecturer in European Public Policy at UCD, and Derek Greene, Lecturer at UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics.