Holger Döring

The Composition of the College of Commissioners Patterns of Delegation

Recent theoretical studies question the view that the European Commission is a preference outlier. This paper addresses this question by discussing the composition of the European College of Commissioners and by focusing on the appointment process. The analysis is based on a data set that contains biographical information for all Commissioners since 1958. The analysis highlights the importance of Commissioners' party affiliation and their previous political positions. Multivariate regression analysis shows that smaller member states have tended to send more highranking politicians to the College of Commissioners than have larger member states. However, party affiliation has not become more important as an appointment criterion.

Introduction

The European Commission is a central political actor in the political system of the European Union (EU). It holds the monopoly to initiate legislation and can bring charges against member states before the European Court of Justice. As the bureaucracy in charge of initiating legislation, it often enjoys informational advantages vis-à-vis the member states. For a long time, the Commission has been seen as a major driving force behind further integration. However, given that member states appoint the members of the Commission, its degree of autonomy has remained controversial. Is the European Commission really a preference outlier?

Many studies contend that it is. In quite a few scholarly accounts, the Commission is pictured as being much more in favour of further integration and more liberal economically than the member states. Contrary to these arguments, [START_REF] Hug | Endogenous Preferences and Delegation in the European Union[END_REF] and [START_REF] Crombez | The Co-Decision Procedure in the European Union[END_REF] have doubted that substantial differences can persist between the political preferences of the Commission and the member states. By using the mechanisms of appointment and by determining the extent of delegation, member states can keep the Commission effectively under control (see also [START_REF] Pollack | The Engines of European Integration: Delegation, Agency, and Agenda Setting in the EU[END_REF].

But do the member states really use the appointment of new Commissioners to exercise control over the Commission? To shed more light on this question, we have to gain a better empirical understanding of the composition of the College of Commissioners. What are the criteria upon which Commissioners are chosen? Does the College of Commissioners' composition reflect the distribution of preferences in the Council? Once we understand the mechanisms behind appointments to the Commission, we can better distinguish whether bureaucratic drift is in fact the result of the composition of the College or is caused by other processes.

Despite the considerable interest in the composition of the College of Commissioners, few empirical studies have been conducted on it. [START_REF] Hooghe | The European Commission and the Integration of Europe: Images of Governance[END_REF] analysed the factors that influence the preferences of high Commission officials. [START_REF] Macmullen | European Commissioners: National Routes to a European Elite[END_REF] was the first to provide biographical information on all Commissioners. [START_REF] Wonka | Delegation and Abdication? The Appointment of European Commissioners and Its Policy Implications[END_REF] linked the biographical information about Commissioners' previous careers to theoretical questions, as raised in the principal-agent literature. He questioned the extent to which member states use the appointment of Commissioners as a control device and contended that member states can control the College of Commissioners quite effectively via the appointment of loyal party members.

Valuable as these empirical studies are, several questions have remained unanswered concerning the relationship between the political preferences of EU member states and those of the Commissioners. One way to shed more light on the preferences of Commissioners is to determine the party linkage of member states and the College of Commissioners. In this respect, two questions are of particular theoretical importance: First, to what extent does the party affiliation of Commissioners match the party composition of the appointing government? Second, to what extent is the increase of the Commission's political importance reflected in the patterns of appointment to the College of Commissioners? The following empirical analysis will answer both questions.

My study contributes to the existing literature in several respects. Unlike previous studies, I account systematically for the differences between large and small member states regarding delegation to the College of Commissioners. Moreover, drawing on a new indicator that captures the relative political importance of a prior political position -from state secretary to prime minister -I am able to observe changes in the relative political importance of appointed Commissioners. With this indicator I can analyse whether member states have sent more high-ranking politicians to the College of Commissioners in Brussels over time.

My analysis shows that, counter-intuitively, party affiliation has not grown in importance as an appointment criterion. Instead, a stronger party political alignment between member state governments and the College of Commissioners is the by-product of a reduction in the number of Commissioners that larger member states can send to Brussels. However, member states have increasingly appointed more important high-ranking politicians as Commissioners, as is shown by the political position previously held by each. In addition, the analysis shows that large and small member states differ substantially in their appointment patterns.

The paper is divided into three sections. In the first part, I discuss different theoretical perspectives on the role of the Commission and derive empirical implications from this literature. Second, I present my empirical analysis of the composition of the College of Commissioners and discuss the results. I conclude by discussing my findings against the background of the theoretical debate on delegation in the European Union.

The European Commission The Commission's position in the European Union

Rational choice institutionalists have always claimed that the Commission plays an important role in EU policy-making [START_REF] Steunenberg | Decision-Making under Different Institutional Arrangements: Legislation by the European Community[END_REF][START_REF] Crombez | Legislative Procedures in the European Community[END_REF]. Contributions have focused on the ability of the Commission to influence legislation through agenda-setting. Three periods are usually distinguished to highlight the power of the Commission in the political system of the EU. In the first period after the Treaty of Rome, the Commission's power was limited. With the Single European Act (SEA), the Commission's agendasetting power gained in importance, but it was somewhat reduced by the Treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam, which introduced the co-decision procedure (see Tsebelis and Garrett, 2001: 359). Given that the Commission has the right to initiate legislation, it can use this power to shape the legislative agenda.

However, the empirical studies on European law-making have focused instead on the conditional agenda-setting power of the European Parliament (EP) in the wake of George Tsebelis's prominent article (1994). It was his provocative claim that shaped the agenda for empirical research. Therefore, more quantitative research has focused on the EP's ability to act as an agendasetter than on the Commission's role in the legislative process (see e.g. Tsebelis et al., 2001). It seems as if the Commission's important role in the legislative process has been taken for granted as being rather uncontroversial.

Surprisingly little is known about the systematic differences in the interests of the Commission and the member states over longer periods of time. Most studies simply assume that the Commission and the EP have a much more pro-European agenda than the member states in the Council. This assumption would appear even more relevant given that critics have pointed out the possibility of the Commission being even more powerful than the agenda-setting models stipulate. For instance, [START_REF] Schmidt | Only an Agenda Setter? The European Commission's Power over the Council of Ministers[END_REF] argues that the Commission not only may be able to choose the policy it prefers among the positions of the member states but also might be able to change the preferences of a member state by threatening to charge it with a treaty violation that would burden it with costly penalties. In addition, information asymmetries provide the Commission with more bargaining leverage, because it can put pressure upon member states in its role as the guardian of the treaties.

The emphasis on information asymmetries comes close to neofunctionalist accounts. From this perspective, high levels of uncertainty provide an advantage for the Commission in EU legislation. Furthermore, in neo-functionalist accounts the European Commission has more than formal agenda-setting power. Here the Commission forms alliances with interest groups to support policies that bolster further integration (Burley and Mattli, 1993: 54). It is the central role of the Commission and its detailed knowledge of the treaties that place it in a more advantageous position vis-à-vis the member states.

To sum up, the various theoretical approaches to European integration agree that the European Commission plays a critical role in the political system of the EU, even though they differ in explaining how and why this is so. For example, rational choice models of EU legislation emphasize the formal agenda-setting power of the Commission after the SEA. According to this view, the Commission's role had been rather limited before this act. However, scholars in the neo-functionalist tradition emphasize the central role of the Commission as a motor of integration. Both approaches agree that the political importance of the Commission has substantially increased over time.

This increase in importance should also be mirrored in the assignment of the Commissioners, but how? Is it reflected in the higher status of the politicians appointed to the College of Commissioners or in a closer party alignment between Commissioners and the appointing governments? Before I address these questions, I will briefly discuss the relevant dimensions of conflict in the political system of the European Union.

Dimensions of conflict in European politics

What are the issue dimensions relevant for EU politics? There is a consensus concerning the basic dimensions of political conflict in European politics. The literature usually distinguishes between the left/right and the integration/ sovereignty dimensions. These two dimensions have been shown to be relevant both for political parties in Europe and for the party groups in the European Parliament (see [START_REF] Ray | Measuring Party Orientations towards European Integration: Results from an Expert Survey[END_REF][START_REF] Gabel | Defining the EU Political Space: An Empirical Study of the European Elections Manifestos, 1979-1999[END_REF].

The extent to which the left/right divide determines decision-making in the European Union has been analysed in a new wave of research. [START_REF] Hix | Power to the Parties: Cohesion and Competition in the European Parliament, 1979-2001[END_REF] show that left/right is a main explanatory variable for party group coalitions in the European Parliament. [START_REF] Mattila | Contested Decisions: Empirical Analysis of Voting in the European Union Council of Ministers[END_REF] provides evidence for the salience of the left/right divide in the Council. [START_REF] Franchino | The Powers of the Union: Delegation in the EU[END_REF] has offered the most extensive study of the party dynamics of European integration to date. He analyses decision-making in the EU by comparing the party positions of the Council and the Commission on the left/right and integration/sovereignty dimensions for the past five decades.

Although the study of party conflicts in the EU has recently become one of the liveliest debates, almost nothing is known about party conflict in the College of Commissioners. Understanding the party dynamics of the appointment process may constitute a valuable first step. Is the political location of a member state government mirrored in the Commission? In other words, are Commissioners chosen on the basis of their political affiliation? We would expect party affiliation to be an important selection criterion for Commissioners. Yet, as we know, co-optation of the (major) opposition party by granting it one of the two Commissioners has often been used as a strategy to broaden support for EU policies and to remove the EU issue from domestic politics in the larger member states. Therefore, the empirical question is whether the average political position of the Commission is closer to the position taken by the member state parliaments or by member state governments. A more coherent understanding of the political dynamics influencing the appointment of Commissioners will contribute significantly to our general understanding of party conflict in the EU. It will allow us to better distinguish between different sources of bureaucratic drift, which I shall address now. Pollack (2003: 103-7) argues that the Commission serves functions that enhance the interest of EU member states. Treaty-based delegation has been created to increase the credibility of the member state commitment to their EU obligations. In particular, the substantial competence of the Commission to bring infringement proceedings against non-compliant member states highlights the Commission's role as a guardian of the treaties. In addition to asking why certain functions are delegated to the Commission, Pollack also answers the question about the way in which the Commission is monitored by the member states. In this context, comitology is perceived as a police patrol mechanism, with which the member states monitor the Commission's activities (see also [START_REF] Franchino | Control of the Commission's Executive Functions: Uncertainty, Conflict and Decision Rules[END_REF].

Delegation to appointed agents

Besides comitology, Pollack (2003: 111-14) claims that member states also monitor the Commission via appointments to it, particularly of the Commission President. He claims that the appointment process is one of the major mechanisms through which member states can influence the decisionmaking of the Commission. He emphasizes that the member states are in full control of the nomination and re-nomination of their Commissioners. Only lately has the role of the European Parliament in the appointment process been strengthened. Pollack highlights the fact that Commissioners are reappointed by their home countries or pursue a career in the domestic politics of their homelands after having served on the Commission.

There have been attempts to clarify the relationship between the Council and the Commission with the help of formal models. Crombez (1997: 7) predicts that the policy preferences of a Commissioner should be similar to the preferences of his or her domestic government. The main insight provided by his model is that member states will appoint only those Commissioners who are likely to initiate legislation that will find support in the Council.

Often the Commission is seen as a preference outlier that is much more in favour of European integration than are the member states in the Council. Drawing on Crombez, Hug (2003: 51) has taken issue with this common assumption in the EU literature. He argues that, in the light of principal-agent theory, it is rather doubtful whether a major divide exists between the Council and the Commission. Two arguments suggest that the Commission should have preferences similar or close to those of the member states. First, since a principal (here the member states) appoints an agent (the College of Commissioners), the preferences of the two should be related. Second, if there were a major divergence between a principal and its agent, the principal should be hesitant to delegate to the agent. Therefore, we should expect the Commission to have preferences similar to those of the Council through two mechanisms of control: the appointment process and the design of delegation.

To test these hypotheses empirically and to understand better what accounts for bureaucratic drift, we have to focus on these two mechanisms. On the one hand, we have to find out whether the member states do in fact use the appointment of Commissioners as a means of control. To answer this question, we need more information on the patterns of delegation to the College. On the other hand, we have to find out whether Commissioners' decisions reflect the preferences of the governments that appointed them. Authors drawing strongly on organizational theory would say they do not. [START_REF] Egeberg | Executive Politics as Usual: Role Behaviour and Conflict Dimensions in the College of European Commissioners[END_REF], for example, theorizes about Commissioners' behaviour and identifies multiple roles that influence their decisions. Among the four roles he suggests -Commission role, portfolio role, country role and party roleonly the last two can be easily manipulated by member states when they nominate a new Commissioner.

To sum up, my theoretical discussion has been an attempt to understand how the interests of the Council and the Commission differ by looking at the appointment process and the Commission's decision-making. There is a lively debate on the degree to which the Commission's actions reflect member states' interests. To understand better how these interests are interrelated we have to find out how greatly the party political compositions of the Council and the Commission differ. In the empirical section, I shall show that member states use the appointment of Commissioners to delegate officials with similar profiles to that of the domestic government.

Determinants of selection

Empirical studies of Commission preferences

What do we know about the Commission's preferences so far? Liesbet Hooghe's work (2001) has substantially enhanced our understanding of the European Commission. In her detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of the preferences of top Commission officials, Hooghe has shown which kinds of factor shape the preferences. In her view, the Commission officials are influenced by the length of their previous national administrative experience, the length of their work in the Commission, their party affiliation and the position of their home country in the EU. As Hooghe argues, the experience in the home country crucially shapes an official's views.

Other studies have explicitly focused on the composition of the College of Commissioners. MacMullen (1997) was -to the best of my knowledgethe first to collect information on all Commissioners. In his study, he focused on biographical aspects of the Commissioners such as age, gender and education. MacMullen provides detailed summaries in which he shows how biographical characteristics differ among Commissioners and indicates patterns over time. The relation between Commission and Council preferences, however, was not of particular interest for this study. Magnette (2005: 80) demonstrates that the College of Commissioners has become more political over time. Although he offers no information about the absolute number, he shows an increase within the last 10-15 years in the number of Commissioners who held high political positions before their promotion to the Commission.

A quantitative analysis of the College of Commissioners focusing on theoretical questions has been provided by [START_REF] Wonka | Delegation and Abdication? The Appointment of European Commissioners and Its Policy Implications[END_REF]. He is the first to have studied the patterns on which the selection of European Commissioners is based. Wonka is particularly interested to know how relevant party membership is for the assignment of new Commissioners. In addition, he tries to assess how much more frequently the Commissioners have been politicians rather than bureaucrats. Wonka, like Hix (2005: 44-6), shows that over time most of the Commissioners held political positions rather than strictly administrative ones before they entered the Commission.

MacMullen and Wonka have made important contributions to an understudied aspect of the European Commission. My paper goes beyond their analyses in several respects. First, my data set contains information on the importance of the previous positions of European Commissioners so that I can distinguish between the relative calibre of these positions. Second, using multivariate statistics, I can better determine how much the importance of party membership has increased and whether member states apply different appointment strategies. In particular, controlling for incumbency, I can better assess whether party affiliation has really become a more important appointment criterion over time. Before starting the empirical analysis, I will briefly summarize the hypothesis to be tested.

Delegation to the Commission

If the relationship between member states and the Commission is perceived to be a principal-agent game, we should expect that the principals (the member states) appoint agents (the Commissioners) with similar preferences. Given that party affiliation is a good indicator of the ideological position of a future Commissioner, it should be a relevant factor in the appointment process. In other words, governments that want to ensure that their interests are represented in the Commission should be more likely to nominate their own party members as Commissioners.

H1: Commissioners are most likely to be members of parties that form the domestic government at the time of appointment.

As discussed above, the practical and political importance of EU policies has risen sharply over time. Most of the literature on legislation in the EU has focused on the period after the SEA in 1987. This treaty gave the Commission substantial agenda-setting power. This power was reduced by the treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam, but since the 1950s the Commission's role in the legislative process of the EU has become more important overall. This leads to two further implications:

H2a: The congruence between the party affiliation of appointed Commissioners and the party composition of the national governments should have become stronger over time.

H2b: Countries have increasingly sent high-ranking politicians to Brussels; or the political importance of Commissioners' prior position has increased over time.

The literature also suggests that the interests of small member states differ from those of large member states (see Pollack, 2001: 224). Small states rely on international institutions for a 'voice', and international institutions are a more efficient means for small states to express their interest than they are for large states. Differences of interest evolve either from different positions in the world economy or from the more limited state capacities of smaller states. For the European Union, Thorhallsson has argued explicitly that small states relate to the Commission differently from large states: '[D]ue to the limited capacity of the administration of the smaller states, they rely more upon the Commission to get their proposals through the Council' (Thorhallsson, 2000: 114).

There is an institutional explanation that points in the same direction. Until the Nice Treaty, bigger member states were allotted two Commissioners. Starting with the Barroso Commission, only one Commissioner now represents every member state. This institutional feature may have generated different delegation patterns between small and large member states. Since small member states used to have only one seat in the College, they had less leverage to ensure that their interests were represented. Therefore, small states' governments should have an even stronger incentive to align their interests with those of their Commissioners. The following implications can be derived from these arguments.

H3a: Small EU member states are more likely to send Commissioners with an affiliation to the party in government.

H3b: Commissioners from smaller member states have held higher political office at home than have Commissioners from larger member states.

I test these hypotheses with a data set that provides information on the previous position of all Commissioners and their party affiliation. In the next section I discuss the data, introduce the methods I have chosen and present my empirical results.

Empirical analysis

Data

My data set contains information on all members of the College of Commissioners since 1958. Each Commissioner in every Commission is coded as one observation (N = 218). For five Commissioners biographical information was not available and for a few Commissioners information about their party affiliation was lacking. My criterion for differentiating between small and large member states is how many Commissioners the country is allowed to send to the Commission. Small states are the ones with only one Commissioner. The member states with two seats in the Commission -France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom -are considered to be large member states. 1 Time is measured in years from 1958, when the first Hallstein Commission came into office. I also include a variable that indicates whether a Commissioner is an incumbent and therefore was a member of the previous Commission.

I use three different variables to measure the dimensions of change in the composition of the Commission. First, I use an indicator that provides information about the political importance of the highest position a Commissioner held before he or she was appointed (cf. [START_REF] Druckman | The Missing Piece: Measuring Portfolio Salience in Western European Parliamentary Democracies[END_REF]. Second, I use a variable that simply codes whether a Commissioner held a political position before he or she entered the College of Commissioners. Former positions like MP, MEP, junior ministers, ministers, and important positions within a party are coded as being political ones. Third, I include party affiliation as an additional variable. Let me describe these variables in some more detail, starting with this last one.

The party affiliation was easily determined for most of the Commissioners. Some Commissioners were not formal party members but had strong connections to one party in their previous career. Other Commissioners pursued a more independent political career. These were usually diplomats, administrators or policy experts. In the context of this paper, it is of interest which party was in government at the time the Commissioner was assigned. I distinguish three scenarios: first, a Commissioner has a strong party connection and is affiliated with a party in government at the time he or she takes office in the College of Commissioners; second, a Commissioner has an affiliation with a national party that is presently in opposition; third, the Commissioner has no direct party affiliation.

It is more difficult to account for the political importance of the position that a given Commissioner held before he or she was nominated. Indexes that have been developed within comparative politics can help assess the importance of political positions. For example, researchers have been interested in the way different ministries are divided among coalition partners. One way to assess the political importance of government offices has been the use of expert surveys. Two approaches figure prominently in the literature. Laver and Hunt (1992: 105) use a ranking based on the importance of different ministries. Experts were asked to rank portfolios according to their importance, but without an underlying scale. The results from this survey show that in almost all countries 'finance' and 'foreign affairs' are considered the two most important portfolios. Recently, [START_REF] Druckman | The Missing Piece: Measuring Portfolio Salience in Western European Parliamentary Democracies[END_REF] also conducted an expert survey to evaluate the importance of portfolios for West European countries. Unlike Laver and Hunt, they asked country experts to base their evaluation on a scale provided in the survey. The logic of the scale is described by the authors in the following way:

In order to obtain interval-level ratings of these posts, we provided our respondents with an anchor by asking them to apply a score of 1 to all posts whose importance they believed equalled the 'average' or 'normal' portfolio. They were then instructed that any post that is above average should receive a score above 1 that would reflect just how much more important it is than an average portfolio (e.g., a score of 1.5 would indicate that the post is 50 per cent above average). Likewise, any below-average post would receive a proportional score of less than 1 (Druckman and Warwick, 2005: 23). I use the data set provided by Druckman and Warwick to compare the previous position of Commissioners across countries and time. I took the highest position that a person had reached in his or her career before he or she entered the Commission and assigned to it the score for that position in Druckman and Warwick's scale. Unfortunately, the Druckman and Warwick data set does not provide information for all member states or for all positions relevant to my context. Where values were unavailable, I assigned values to positions. One might have additional reservations concerning the use of the Druckman and Warwick data. The survey, conducted from 2000 to 2002, reports only one score for a ministry's importance, even though the relevance of some ministries might have changed significantly over time. In addition, cross-sectional comparability might be limited since experts may apply different definitions of an average position. Still, it is the best source available and, since information about the importance of Commissioners' previous positions is crucial for a better understanding of delegation within the EU, I make use of the Druckman and Warwick data in my subsequent analysis.

Descriptive analysis

Let me start with some descriptive statistics. Table 1 provides information about the party affiliation of Commissioners. Immediately we observe a strong difference between Commissioners from small and large member states. Although we find Commissioners who belong to parties both in office and in opposition, some patterns emerge. First of all, small states have a significantly higher percentage of Commissioners from governing parties than from opposition parties. If we control for the incumbent status of a Commissioner, we find that almost all Commissioners from small member states who belong to a domestic opposition party have been incumbents. In fact, only one non-incumbent Commissioner from a small state was identified as belonging to an opposition party -the first Finnish Commissioner, Erkki Antero Liikanen.

However, several small states have sent Commissioners with no party affiliation. For example, Luxembourg and Denmark have always sent either members of the governing parties or persons with no party connection. Greece and Portugal have sent only Commissioners with an affiliation to the governing party. In general it seems as if the pattern has changed over time. In the latest Commissions, almost no Commissioner of a small state had an affiliation with an opposition party. This finding supports the expectation that small states in particular will want to secure the preference alignment between the domestic principal and the European agents in the Commission. ---------------------- The picture looks different when we analyse large member states. Here, no general pattern emerges, although some trends and tendencies can be depicted. Britain and Spain, for example, have always filled their two Commission seats with one Commissioner from each of the two main parties, Conservative/Labour and Partido Popular/Socialists, respectively. Germany has usually sent Commissioners who were affiliated with one of the governing parties, but never a Commissioner without any party affiliation. For France and Italy, no patterns can be found by simple data inspection. All in all, the difference between small -one Commissioner -and large member states is striking. Larger members sent opposition members much more often. For the smaller members, almost all of the Commissioners with an affiliation to an opposition party had been incumbents (see below for the multivariate confirmation of this finding).

To assess the relative political importance of the previous position of an EU Commissioner, I make use of a new data set that provides us with a continuous measure for portfolio importance (see [START_REF] Druckman | The Missing Piece: Measuring Portfolio Salience in Western European Parliamentary Democracies[END_REF]. I use the Commission Presidents to demonstrate how positions are translated into 'importance scores' and thereby help explain better the measure applied here. Table 2 shows the highest previous position held by each Commission President. In addition, it shows the score assigned to these positions and the average position score of the Commission headed by the respective President. Keeping in mind that this scale of portfolio importance might provide us with a rough and basic measure only, we still can use this scale to depict trends and tendencies.

Table 2 suggests that there has been a substantial increase in the importance of the previous political positions held by Commission Presidents. Whereas the first President had formerly been a junior minister, subsequent Presidents had held a ministerial portfolio, often for the most important national ministries. Lately, Commission Presidents have been former prime ministers. In addition, all Commission Presidents were members of a party that was in government in their home country. 2 This observation is in line with the expectation that the heightened importance of the Commission should be reflected in the importance of Commissioners' previous positions. The box plot in Figure 1 provides additional support for this hypothesis. It shows that the importance of the previous positions of Commissioners has increased over time. Both the median of the position scores and the highest position held by a Commissioner have risen. In addition, we see that the frequency of Commissioners in the lowest quartile has dropped. Commissioners with no previous political experience are given a score of 0.2, and Figure 1 shows that this group provided a significant number of Commissioners in the early years. The Barroso Commission, in contrast, has no member from this group. The data clearly confirm our expectation. An increasing importance of the Commission is reflected in more powerful political actors delegated to the College of Commissioners over time. To analyse this link further, I continue with a multivariate analysis that enables me to control for additional factors such as incumbency and national background.

Multivariate analysis

In studying the changing composition of the Commission, I use three different indicators: first, the highest position held by a Commissioner -in other words, the position score; second, whether he or she had been in a political position before; and, third, the person's party affiliation at the time he or she was appointed to the Commission. Methodologically, these three variables are of different types and require different multivariate models. Party affiliation is coded as a categorical variable and has to be analysed with a multinomial logit model. Whether a Commissioner has held a political position before is coded through a dummy variable and analysed with a logit model. An ordinary least squares (OLS) model is used to analyse the position scores of the Commissioners. The results of the analysis are shown in Table 3. I present a more in-depth discussion of these models in the following sections.

To find out how the factors that I have discussed -incumbency and country size -are interrelated with other factors, I present the results of a multivariate analysis. Based on the three categories for party affiliationmember of government party, opposition member, no party affiliation -I conducted a multinomial logit regression in which each category is compared with a reference group.

Model 1 of Table 3 presents the results of this analysis. It indicates that there is in fact a strong difference between EU members with only one representative in the College of Commissioners and large member states with two Commission members. Commissioners with an affiliation to a domestic party in the opposition are less likely to be from smaller states. The results show also that, contrary to the theoretical expectations, Commissioners are not more likely to be members of governing parties over time. There is some evidence that the number of Commissioners with no party affiliation has decreased.

To shed more light on the political dimension of a Commissioner's previous career, I conducted a further analysis. I divided all Commissioners into two groups -politicians and Commissioners who had held no previous political positions. This variable separates politicians from Commissioners who previously had neither parliamentarian nor ministerial positions and therefore no politically relevant positions. Model 2 of Table 3 displays the results of the logit analysis. It can be seen that Commissioners have been less likely to be in non-political positions over time. To illustrate the result of the logit analysis I have calculated the predicted values over time. 3 Figure 2 shows the results of this analysis. The figure illustrates that the probability that a Commissioner was in a political position before he or she took office in Brussels has increased sharply over time. In addition, the model predicts that almost half of the early Commissioners had never before held a political position. The graph also reveals a significant difference, decreasing over time, between small and large member states. For small member states, the results confirm insights gained from the descriptive data analysis. First, if a Commissioner is a member of a domestic opposition party, he or she is most likely to have once been a member of the Commission. Second, the number of Commissioners with no party affiliation has decreased over time. The multivariate analysis also shows almost no changes in the party affiliation of Commissioners over time with respect to government/opposition status. Contrary to an often held view in the literature, Commissioners are not more likely to be government party members over time. This latter finding contradicts some of the expectations I raised in the first part of the paper.

The effect of the finding changed through the institutional reform of the College of Commissioners in the Nice Treaty. Now every member state has one seat in the College of Commissioners. Given that countries with only one seat in the College delegate politicians from the governing parties as Commissioners, we find a closer similarity between the parties in the Council and those in the College of Commissioners.

Let me now turn to an analysis of the calibre of previous positions. The advantage of measuring the significance of previous positions as discussed above is that it provides a continuous scale with which to compare different positions held by Commissioners before they entered the Commission. In the analysis, I determine the influence of time and nation size on a country's delegation behaviour with the help of an OLS regression. 4 The increased importance of the Commission should be reflected in the fact that persons with higher political positions take office over time. In addition, I expect that especially small states have a strong interest in the European Commission. Therefore, they should send persons who have held higher political positions than those previously held by Commissioners from larger member states.

The results of the analysis are presented in Model 3 of Table 3. Generally, they confirm the implications drawn from the delegation literature. Some further discussion helps to clarify the implications of these results and the general performance of the model. To understand the results, we should keep in mind that the scale measuring the importance of previous positions can be divided into four categories. The highest category consists of former prime ministers and the most important national portfolios, the second category of average ministers, the third category of junior ministers and less important ministries, and the last category of almost all other, primarily nongovernmental, positions (MPs, diplomats, policy experts, etc.). Given that each of these categories consists of a range of about 0.4, we can infer from the regression results that the Commissioners' previous positions have shifted from those of former junior ministers and non-governmental positions -especially diplomats -to those of governmental experience in average ministries.

Looking at the results of the regression analysis, we are surprised to see how significantly more high-profile politicians have been assigned as Commissioners by smaller member states. It is not so much the finding as such but the strength of the finding that catches our attention. Again considering the data in categorical terms, we note that, on average, smaller member states have delegated Commissioners one category above larger member states. More precisely, the data show us that larger member states were still sending junior ministers and MPs at a time when smaller member states were already sending former ministers to the Commission.

To sum up, the finding that the importance of delegates to the College of Commissioners has increased over time reflects the more important role of the Commission. More surprising is the fact that small states seem to delegate persons with a significantly higher profile than do the larger member states. It is not necessarily surprising that this is statistically significant, but it is more surprising with respect to the scope of this influence.

Conclusion

Commissioners are usually members of governing parties, and the increased importance of the Commission over time is reflected in the previous positions of EU Commissioners. Contrary to the arguments discussed in the theoretical section of this article, it cannot be statistically shown that the importance of a Commissioner's party affiliation has increased over time. It has been a constant pattern that most of the Commissioners are members of parties in domestic governments. As long as bigger member states delegated two Commissioners, one of them was often an opposition member. Only the number of Commissioners with no party affiliation has decreased. The increased political role of the Commission is represented in the previous positions of the Commissioners rather than in their party affiliation.

In the study, I reveal two patterns of delegation to the Commission that require more detailed investigation in the future. First, why do appointment strategies vary so significantly between small and large member states? Second, and partly related to the former, how can substantial differences in patterns of delegation among large member states be explained? The delegation behaviour of some large member states follows a principal-agent logic -these countries assign Commissioners from governing parties. In contrast, other states regularly include opposition members. These differences can hardly be explained in the light of principal-agent theory without including domestic factors. More comparative work investigating the appointment process may help to reveal these domestic factors.

Detailed knowledge of the appointment process is a first step toward a better understanding of delegation to the Commission and of possible sources of bureaucratic drift. It sheds new light on the distribution of interests between the Commission and the Council. In my view, two further steps are necessary for a more coherent understanding of bureaucratic drift. First, we have to find out how the allocation of portfolios in the Commission influences decision-making in the College. A member state government may try to guarantee its influence in the Commission not only by appointing loyal delegates but also by securing a portfolio that is of special interest to the country. 5 Currently, we do not know enough about the logic of portfolio allocation in the College to investigate this link further. Second, we have to find out the extent to which Commissioners' decisions reflect their domestic parties' positions or those of their home countries. What is the linkage between national governments and Commissioners after the appointment of a new Commission? A broad literature based on organizational studies claims that the link is rather weak and that bureaucratic drift results from socialization in office. On both issues -the relevance of the portfolio allocation and the actual decisions of Commissioners -we still lack a comprehensive empirical understanding that would help us to discriminate between different theoretical explanations of bureaucratic drift. Having outlined the patterns of appointment to the College of Commissioners, I hope that this study provides insights for future research on the issue.

Notes

For comments and suggestions I am grateful to Michael Blauberger, Christian Breunig, Morten Egeberg, Philipp Rehm, Armin Schäfer, Julia Sievers and three anonymous reviewers. I especially thank Philip Manow for feedback on earlier drafts. 1 In the current Barroso Commission all member states are allowed to send only one Commissioner. Neither the exclusion of the Barroso Commission from the quantitative analysis nor its inclusion affects my results. 2 Malfatti resigned as President in 1972 to run for office in Italy. Sicco Mansholt, previously a Vice-President, took the position for the rest of the term. At the time, the Dutch social democrats (PvDA) were not part of government in the Netherlands. 3 For the calculation, the incumbent status is set to 0. Therefore the predicted values on which the graph is based give probabilities for new Commissioners. 4 To evaluate the robustness of my analysis, I also analysed my regression results through a multinomial logit model. For this analysis I divided all previous positions into four groups and analysed how the composition changed over time. This analysis leads to the same results as the normal regression. Since the latter is easier to interpret, I present only these results here. 5 I owe this idea to an anonymous reader.

Figure 1

 1 Figure 1 Box plot of former positions (scores) of Commissioners.

Figure 2

 2 Figure 2Predicted probability of having a political position.

Table 1

 1 Party affiliation of Commissioners

	2 1 8	European Union Politics 8(2)

Table 3

 3 Determinants of party affiliation and previous positions of Commissioners

		Model 1		Model 2	Model 3
	GLM -Model	Multinomial logit a		Logit b	OLS
	Dependent variable	Opposition	No	Political	Position
		party c	party	position	score d
	Years since 1958	0.012	-0.039	1.067	0.011
		(0.78)	(1.95)*	(4.25)***	(3.72)***
	Incumbent Commissioner	-0.656	0.151	0.697	-0.091
		(1.44)	(0.20)	(0.93)	(-1.18)
	Country with one seat	-3.711	-0.211	3.259	0.332
		(3.52)***	(0.28)	(2.65)***	(4.20)***
	One seat and incumbent	3.528	0.786
		(2.94)***	(0.73)
	Constant	-0.829	-1.430		0.473
		(1.77)*	(2.27)**		(5.21)***
	N	208		213	213
	Likelihood ratio χ 2	36.41		37.01
	Pseudo-R 2 (McFadden)	0.12		0.18
	R 2				0.19
	Sources: Munzinger archive and LexisNexis for biographical information of commissioners.
	Software: Stata 9.2 and R 2.3.
	Notes: Absolute value of z-statistics (logit models) and t-statistics (OLS) in parentheses.
	a Reference category: Commissioners who were affiliated with a party in government.
	b Odds ratios shown; reference category: Commissioners that held no political position before.
	c Government status of Commissioner's party from Woldendorp et al. (2000).
	d Source: Druckman and Warwick (2005).
	*** significant at 1%; ** significant at 5%; * significant at 10%.

European Union Politics 8(2)


Sara Hagemann

Applying Ideal Point Estimation Methods to the Council of Ministers

This research note addresses an increasingly popular topic in the EU literature, namely the measurement of policy preferences in the Council of Ministers. It aims to provide conclusions on three issues: (1) what data are in fact available from the Council, (2) how preferences are measured in other legislatures, and (3) whether these methods would be suitable for analyses of Council members' preference positions given the available data. Applying the popular scaling method NOMINATE and a Bayesian MCMC model to a data set consisting of all legislation adopted by the Council in 1999-2004, it is found that, although the two methods show similar voting patterns at the general level, the failure to report standard errors by NOMINATE in particular proves to be a severe problem when trying to identify individual governments' policy location. Conversely, the Bayesian approach provides a convincing method for analyses of Council decision records and is easily extended to include more advanced empirical information than merely the governments' decisions to support or oppose a proposal.

Introduction

Empirical investigations into voting behaviour and preference locations of members in the European Union's (EU) Council of Ministers 1 have recently become a popular topic in the academic EU literature. Yet, although the field is still in its infancy, much disagreement has already emerged over appropriate methods of measurement. In some cases different studies have even presented contradictory evidence on the same issues, owing to a difference in research methods and underlying assumptions about the actors' preference configurations.

This research note wishes to discuss and provide conclusions on three issues: [START_REF]MCMC. Notes: AU1: First government of Austria in the 1999-2004 period. AU2: Second government of Austria in the 1999-2004 period. BE1: First government of Belgium in the[END_REF] what data are in fact available from the Council, (2) how preferences are measured in other legislatures based on decision records, and (3) whether these methods would also be suitable for analyses of Council members' preference positions given the available data. Two popular methods are considered in detail, namely a Bayesian simulation approach and the NOMINATE scaling method technique. When applying these methods to a large data set covering all legislation adopted from January 1999 to May 2004, it is found that a Bayesian model offers several attractive possibilities for measuring the governments' revealed preferences. NOMINATE is less convincing in its results, mainly owing to the failure to report standard errors around the governments' ideal point estimates. The simulation-based Bayesian Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) model implicitly addresses such issues and furthermore makes it possible to advance the analysis to include factors other than merely the voting outcomes. These aspects are particularly valuable in the complex Council scenario, where it may be of relevance to take into account also national political effects, vote trading, policy substance or even changes in the political agenda and institutional set-up.

Existing accounts of conflict structures and preferences in the Council

The past decade has seen a number of different theoretical models applied to the EU context in order to assess and analyse the relative impact of EU institutions, the consequences of the decision rules and, most recently, the effect of party configurations. The models have come in various forms and are often presented in a spatial manner (e.g. [START_REF] Crombez | Legislative Procedures in the European Community[END_REF][START_REF] Crombez | Institutional Reform and Codecision in the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Garrett | Why Resist the Temptation to Apply Power Indices to the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Steunenberg | Codecision and Its Reform: A Comparative Analysis of Decision-Making Rules in the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Tsebelis | An Institutional Critique of Intergovernmentalism[END_REF] or based on voting power indices (e.g. Felsenthal andMachover, 1997, 2001;[START_REF] Hosli | Coalitions and Power: Effects of Qualified Majority Voting in the Council of the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Hosli | Power, Connected Coalitions, and Efficiency: Challenges to the Council of the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] König | The Inclusiveness of European Decision Rules[END_REF][START_REF] Laurelle | Is the Allocation of Voting Power among the EU States Fair?[END_REF][START_REF] Leech | Designing the Voting System for the EU Council of Ministers[END_REF][START_REF] Pajala | A Priori versus Empirical Voting Power in the EU Council of Ministers[END_REF]. However, common to most of these models is still a lack of rigorous empirical testing, making it hard to assess the explanatory validity of each of the models. In particular, the lack of data from the Council has posed a problem for scholars who have wished to engage with either positivist or normative evaluations of the Council members' preferences, voting behaviour and the consequences of the Council dynamics for EU legislative processes in general. Nevertheless, the literature has recently come some way in the empirical investigation of the functioning of the Council and, similarly to many other policy fields, the increasing number of empirical studies has started to divide into groups distinguished by a reliance on either qualitative or quantitative research methods. However, whereas the qualitative studies of politics and policies in the Council have indeed provided important and invaluable insights into the formal and informal processesand should of course continue to be a permanent part of the research agenda -a demand for further quantitative investigations is dominant at this point in the research process. A recent increase in the accessibility of Council documents and voting records has started to enable such research, though a question has now also arisen about whether the information from the Council is actually suitable for deriving conclusions about behaviour and preferences.

Available data from the Council

Almost every study of Council decision-making begins with a complaint that the large amount of legislation adopted by unanimity makes it difficult for outsiders to get a proper insight into the institution. The criticism is well founded because it is quite difficult to analyse voting in the Council when between 70% and 95% of all legislation is adopted by unanimity (see [START_REF] Mattila | Contested Decisions: Empirical Analysis of Voting in the European Union Council of Ministers[END_REF][START_REF] Hayes-Renshaw | The Council of Ministers[END_REF]. However, such findings result from analyses of Council members' behaviour at the very last adoption stage. Moreover, the data from which those results are derived are usually collected from the Council's monthly summaries or the summarized minutes, which provide only the title of the policy proposals together with the final conclusions of the negotiations.

With this focus, other important sources of information may be overlooked. First, decisions from stages prior to the final adoption stage are now publicly accessible via the public register of the Council and/or the PreLex database available on the EU website. 2 This means that the restriction of studies of voting behaviour to final stage decisions is no longer necessary and, to put it frankly, perhaps not even legitimate. At the adoption stage the governments decide whether to accept or to reject a proposal altogether, whereas the earlier stages can be assumed to include negotiations over the content of the policy. Furthermore, the member states' voting behaviour may change in accordance with the exchange of information and strategies that prevail throughout the different stages of negotiations. Therefore, voting behaviour can be assumed to be different at the final adoption stage compared with prior readings, and hence it becomes of great importance to include decisions from earlier stages as well. Second, Council members often make formal statements following the adoption of a proposal, and these formal statements may reveal yet another level of contest in the Council. The formal statements indicate a country's disagreement with the policy and are often included even in cases where it may not have been expressed through formal voting. Or the formal statements are included in order to highlight countryspecific standards related to the policy that a member state wishes to bring to the attention of other Council members or external actors. The first case is of course quite interesting from a political science perspective, because it requires some explanation why governments want to state their opposition after the adoption of a proposal or a common position, yet chose not to do so by formal voting. 3 The above points are obviously not made to suggest that taking into account every legislative stage as well as the formal statements will solve all issues of transparency and provide full information about Council members' preference positions. The Council still adopts a large number of decisions by a high degree of recorded consensus, and the only formal accounts are the releases of the common position and related statements in the minutes of meetings held behind closed doors in the respective Council formations. Hence, it is difficult to evaluate any possible effect of political signalling or vote trading or whether the outcomes are in fact a product of preference alignments. Nevertheless, the point here is that the picture drawn in the current literature may not fully capture the data available from the Council; most scholars prefer to highlight what is not available.

But exactly what information is it possible to obtain regarding Council members' behaviour and preferences based on decision records? From the minutes of individual Council meetings it is usually possible to get information on the following issues related to policy proposals:

• the procedure, • the date of introduction, • the date of adoption, • A and B points, • the policy area (as categorized by the General Secretariat, preparatory bodies and the Commission), • the title of the proposal,

• details about the policy content, • an inter-institutional reference number, • Sectoral Council, • the stage of the legislative process when the vote was taken, • the stage of the legislative process when the proposal was adopted, • the identity of the member holding the presidency, and • each country's decision to (a) support, (b) abstain, (c) oppose, and/or (d) make a formal statement. Formal statements are either included in the minutes or posted separately on the Council's website.

As mentioned, information on each of these points is available across the legislative stages. Combined with related information regarding, for example, voting outcomes in the Council's working groups or the European Parliament's plenary, 4 the conclusion must be that data are indeed available on several important aspects of legislative politics in the Council.

Biased results?

Using the above-mentioned data is of course only of interest if the recorded information from the Council provides an adequate picture of what goes on between the governments. Obviously, it does not make sense to draw any conclusions on the basis of decision outcomes if the individual governments' decisions do not reflect their preferences. And there are reasons to believe that the Council figures may be somewhat biased. First, opposing the majority is very costly in the Council because a member is more or less excluded from any further negotiations on a policy proposal once it states its opposition. Members will always be present at the negotiating table, though if a country decides not to join the majority coalition, it will not be considered in the construction of an agreement. The only exception is, of course, if the member is in the favourable position of being the pivotal legislator. In this case the threat to oppose is in effect a threat to veto and hence ensures inclusion. Second, the distribution of vote shares and the qualified majority voting (QMV) requirement make opposition by any single member in effect irrelevant to the policy outcome, most likely resulting in a tendency for members to oppose the majority only when there is a strong reason to do so.

The decision actively to oppose may therefore be owing to a need to send signals to either internal or external actors. Conversely, this also means that, when a member decides to voice its disapproval, such a statement can be interpreted as representing profound disagreement with the common position. The cost of going against the majority is simply too high unless there are very strong reasons to do so. In sum, conclusions drawn on the basis of recorded oppositions in the Council should hence be reliable; it is the underlying causes for the votes in favour of proposals, however, that are inconclusive.

Besides the relative certainty with which one can rely on the votes cast in opposition to the majority, another advantage of analysing minutes from individual Council meetings is that they include all decisions adopted. It would of course make the coding much easier if one could rely on records of roll-call votes similar to those from the European Parliament (e.g. [START_REF] Hix | Democracy in the European Parliament[END_REF]. However, voting records often include only a sub-set of the votes, which may have different characteristics from the full population of decisions. Hence, one advantage of quantitative analyses of data from individual Council meetings is that there is no risk of selection bias from analysing minutes as there is from analysing voting records if these do not cover all decisions made [START_REF] Carruba | Off the Record: Unrecorded Legislative Votes, Selection Bias and Roll Call Analysis[END_REF]. Furthermore, and as mentioned above, the Council minutes also make it possible to take into account members who do not wish to oppose by voting but who make strong points against a proposal in a formal statement. Similarly to disagreement expressed through voting, the formal statements can also be assumed to indicate Council members' sincere opposition to a vote since they cannot directly affect the proposal in question but mainly serve the purpose of stating a position. Hence, apart from elevating the figures for recorded disagreement, including the formal statements in analyses of decision records may indeed provide another step in the direction of more accurately capturing the conflict structures in the Council.

Measuring revealed preferences in the Council

How are legislators' preferences best measured? And which methods of measurement are suitable for analysing the information available from the Council? Researchers across the social sciences have undertaken a plethora of efforts to put the measurement of individuals' preferences on a firm footing. Yet there is not one final answer as to which method provides the most appropriate framework for such analyses. And the purpose of this research note is certainly not to undertake a full literature review and evaluation of the field. However, one recently developed method in particular appears to be a particularly interesting and convincing method for measuring actors' preferences in the case of the Council. The method is based on a Bayesian model for ideal point estimation and is a very convincing alternative to other current and popular statistical methods of ideal point estimation such as NOMINATE and Optimal Classification (OC) [START_REF] Poole | Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting[END_REF]. Similarly to NOMINATE and OC estimates, the Bayesian MCMC method is concerned with the positioning of actors' ideal points [START_REF] Davis | An Expository Development of a Mathematical Model of the Electoral Process[END_REF].

The reason why it is important to find an appropriate method for estimating actors' ideal points is that the distribution of ideal point estimates indicates how legislators behave and which cleavages shape the policy space within which the legislators act (see [START_REF] Clinton | The Statistical Analysis of Roll Call Data[END_REF][START_REF] Mccarty | The Hunt for Party Discipline in Congress[END_REF]. Both the scaling method techniques and the Bayesian approach have proven substantively to advance insights into the legislative dynamics in other decision-making bodies and would allow for rigorous testing of the long list of predictions derived from the current literature's models of governments' voting behaviour and preferences in the Council.

A Bayesian method for analysing preferences in the Council

Scaling method techniques such as NOMINATE and OC have become increasingly popular for estimating legislators' ideal points and, subsequently, for making inferences about the policy space of a given legislative assembly [START_REF] Hix | Democracy in the European Parliament[END_REF][START_REF] Morgenstern | Patterns of Legislative Politics[END_REF][START_REF] Poole | Spatial Models of Parliamentary Voting[END_REF][START_REF] Poole | Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting[END_REF][START_REF] Rosenthal | Analyzing Roll Calls with Perfect Spatial Voting: France 1946-1958[END_REF][START_REF] Schonhardt-Bailey | Ideology, Party and Interests in the British Parliament of 1841-1847[END_REF][START_REF] Voeten | Clashes of the Assembly[END_REF]. However, at the same time that these methods are being applied to more and more empirical data sets, it is also becoming increasingly apparent that these methods suffer from both statistical and theoretical deficiencies [START_REF] Clinton | The Statistical Analysis of Roll Call Data[END_REF][START_REF] Lewis | Measuring Bias and Uncertainty in Ideal Point Estimates via the Parametric Bootstrap[END_REF].

The main criticism is that standard errors are not reported when generating ideal point estimates in either NOMINATE or OC, which makes it impossible to draw conclusions about the variance around the estimates. Consequently, a concern arises regarding whether the estimates are indeed consistent and provide fully reliable results [START_REF] Poole | Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting[END_REF][START_REF] Lewis | Measuring Bias and Uncertainty in Ideal Point Estimates via the Parametric Bootstrap[END_REF][START_REF] Jackman | Multidimensional Analysis of Roll Call Data via Bayesian Simulation: Identification, Estimation, Inference and Model Checking[END_REF]. Therefore, although these scaling method techniques have indeed provided important insights into the underlying structures and into actors' preferences in a number of legislatures, a recently developed Bayesian model seems more attractive because it includes estimates for both actors' ideal points and the issues voted upon, as well as reporting the standard errors around the estimates. Additionally, the model as described below can easily be extended to take into account more complex behavioural assumptions such as the number and nature of underlying dimensions, apparent party coalitions, determinants of legislator preferences, and the evolution of the legislative agenda. This may be particularly interesting in the complex setting of the Council where institutional, national and/or party political factors may have an impact on governments' voting behaviour. This makes it generally inappropriate to use estimates of extant methods -usually generated under the assumption of sincere voting -to test models embodying alternative assumptions (e.g. vote trading) (Clinton et al., 2004: 355).

The standard model is characterized as follows. 5 Whereas spatial voting models usually include deterministic utility functions, the Bayesian model takes into account that in empirical analysis it is often more convenient to choose a parametric specification for the utilities and to add a stochastic disturbance [START_REF] Poole | Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting[END_REF]. Here, the utility function is assumed to be quadratic for legislators with normal errors. (For other examples see [START_REF] Heckman | Linear Probability Models of the Demand for Attributes with an Empirical Application to Estimating the Preferences of Legislators[END_REF][START_REF] Poole | Spatial Models of Parliamentary Voting[END_REF]Rosenthal, 1997. See Clinton et al., 2004, for a comparison of the different specifications.) Assume that the data consist of n legislators voting on m different roll calls. Each roll call j = 1, . . . , m presents legislators I = 1, . . . , n with a choice between a 'Yes' position ζ j and a 'No' position ψ j , and locations in R d , where d denotes the dimension of the policy space. Let y ij = 1 if legislator i votes 'Yes' on the jth roll call and Y ij = 0 otherwise. As mentioned, legislators are assumed to have quadratic utility functions over the policy space, U i (ζ j ) = -ʈ x i -ζ j ʈ 2 + η ij , and U i (ψ j ) = -ʈ x i -ψ j ʈ 2 + ν ij , where x i ∈ R d is the ideal point of legislator i, η ij and ν ij are the errors or stochastic elements of utility, and ʈ • ʈ is the Euclidean norm. Utility maximization implies that y ij = 1 if U i (ζ j ) > U i (ψ j ) and Y ij = 0 otherwise. The specification is completed by assigning a distribution to the errors. Here, the assumption is that the errors η ij and ν ij have a joint normal distribution with E(η ij ) = E(ν ij ), var(η ij -ν ij ) = σ j 2 and the errors are independent across both legislators and roll calls. It then follows that

P(y ij = 1) = P(U i (ζ j ) > (U i (ψ j )) = P(ν ij -η ij < ʈ x i -ψ j ʈ 2 -ʈ x i ζ j ʈ 2 ) = P(ν ij -η ij < 2(ζ j -ψ j )Јx i + ψЈ j ψ j -ζЈ j ζ j ) = Φ(βЈ j -α j ),
where β j = 2(ζ j -ψ j )/σ j , α j = (ζЈ j ζ j -ψЈ j ψ j )/σ j , and Φ(•) denotes the standard normal distribution function. This corresponds to a probit model with an unobserved regressor x i corresponding to the legislator's ideal point (a logit model results if the errors have extreme value distributions). The coefficient vector β j is the direction of the jth proposal in the policy space relative to the 'No' position.

Since it is assumed that there is independence across legislators and votes, the likelihood is

L((B, α, X|Y) = (xЈ i β j -α j ) yij ϫ (1 -Φ(xЈ i βj -α j )) 1 -yij , Φ j m = ∏ 1 i n = ∏ 1
where B is an m x d matrix with jth row βЈ j , α = (a 1 , … , α m )Ј, X is an n x d matrix with ith row xЈ j , and Y is the n x m matrix of observed votes the (i,j)th element y ij . Then, rather than adopting certain restrictions and having to calculate appropriate starting values such as is done in NOMINATE and OC [START_REF] Poole | Spatial Models of Parliamentary Voting[END_REF], the Bayesian approach treats the unknown ideal points and other parameters as random variables and conditions upon the observed rollcall data. A brief, non-technical explanation of the procedure is the following: the fundamental difficulty in roll-call analysis is that everything other than the votes is unobservable. The ideal points, bill parameters and utilities are unknowns. But, if it were possible to impute values to the bill parameters and utilities, then the ideal points could be estimated by regression. By the same logic, if it were possible to impute values for the ideal points and utilities, the bill parameters could also be estimated by regression. The MCMC algorithm repeatedly performs these imputations and regressions, starting from an arbitrary point and alternating between simulation of the ideal points, bill parameters and utilities. Under a wide set of conditions (e.g. [START_REF] Tierney | Introduction to General State-Space Markov Chain Theory[END_REF] MCMC algorithms are guaranteed to generate samples from the posterior density of the model parameters, regardless of where in the parameter space the algorithm is initialized (Clinton et al., 2004: 357).

Applying NOMINATE and an MCMC model to Council data

I described the Bayesian MCMC model in the simplest possible form above. In this section I will present the results from applying the MCMC algorithm to a large data set consisting of all legislation adopted by the Council from January 1999 to May 2004. 6 I will also present the findings from running the data with NOMINATE and compare the suitability of the two methods for analysing the data.

I collected the data set used for producing the findings in this section from minutes of individual Council meetings 7 and the sources described in previous sections. In other words, the data cover all decisions from each stage of the legislative process, and also include the formal statements following a vote on 932 pieces of legislation. A government expressing serious concerns about a decision or stating direct disagreement in the formal statements has been treated as if it opposed the majority. The number of legislative decisions in the 1999-2004 period totals 1281 and results in (15 ϫ 1281 =) 19,215 individual votes. 8 Figure 1 shows Council members' ideal point estimates based on MCMC calculations using the 'MCMCpack' written by [START_REF] Martin | Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) Package[END_REF]. Figure 2 shows the ideal point estimates as measured by NOMINATE, and Table 1 presents the goodness-of-fit of using NOMINATE with the data set.

A first thing to note from the reported results is that the Aggregate Proportional Reduction of Error (APRE) values for NOMINATE show that 61% of the votes are classified in the first dimension by this model. Compared with the other above-mentioned research projects relying on NOMINATE, the method does not seem to perform quite as convincingly with this data set, although a significant part of the votes is still captured by the scaling method.

Including further dimensions from the NOMINATE outputs, and thereby increasing the percentage of votes classified by the method, does not count as a suitable way of getting NOMINATE to perform better either; NOMINATE can deliver outputs for any number of specified dimensions, yet this does not of course result in a better fit with the data if those dimensions are measured with high uncertainty, as might be the case here. In fact, since the MCMC method produces an output only for the number of dimensions it is able to estimate correctly, and since it can be observed here that MCMC does not even produce an output for any higher number of dimensions, accurate specifications are probably not possible above the first dimension at all with this data set. Indeed, the NOMINATE results in Figure 2 do not appear to include any 'readable' voting patterns in the second dimension either. Hence, it can be deduced that, according to the recorded behaviour, Council decision-making is actually one-dimensional.

Turning to the content of Figures 1 and2, it should be noted that countries that in the years 1999-2004 had more than one government are represented in the figures with their acronym followed by either a 1 or a 2 depending on whether it is the first or the second government's ideal point estimate. Although the intention of this research note is not to provide an empirical analysis of voting behaviour in the Council but rather to discuss the suitability of the ideal point estimation methods, two observations should be mentioned from the findings. First, the fact that both Figure 1 and Figure 2 show distinct ideal point estimates for two governments from the same country indicates that a government change means a change in behaviour in the Council. Second, and probably related thereto, it is interesting to observe that the governments that are commonly assumed to promote centre-left or left-wing policies are all located towards the centre-left of the policy spectrum in the first dimension in both figures. Conversely, governments from a centreright or right-wing background are almost all located towards the right-hand side of the picture. In other words, it appears as if both the NOMINATE results and the findings from the MCMC model indicate more of a party political divide than a cleavage based on geographical location or other national characteristics. Considering the complex Council scenario and taking into account previous findings from the literature, this result is rather interesting and probably deserves more attention in future empirical analyses of minutes from the Council.

The results generated by the two methods hence appear quite similar with regard to the number of policy dimensions and to governments' overall voting patterns: although the order of some countries changed from the first dimension in the NOMINATE findings to the order reported in the MCMC results, the same groups of governments are still found on either side of the policy centre. However, from Figure 1 it is obvious that there are reasons to be cautious about the interpretation of the governments' ideal point estimates. The density curves show that the ideal point estimates have a high level of standard errors and the large area covered by each government in many cases makes it difficult to distinguish between governments adjacent to one another along the identified policy dimension. In particular, the governments located towards the extremes appear to have large standard errors, at the same time as several of the more centrally located governments are almost undistinguishable in their location in the policy space. These issues are not apparent in the densely estimated NOMINATE points, and a general concern therefore arises whether the method is at all useful with these data. Inferences about specific locations, such as the location of individual governments' ideal points or the exact location of the median position of the Council or that of the pivotal member(s), become especially problematic with these large confidence intervals around the estimates.

Furthermore, Figure 3 shows the relationship between the results from the two methods, and here it becomes evident that the high level of standard errors is challenging: the correlation between the estimates produced by the two methods is only moderate. Hence, the overall conclusion must be that, although one could reach similar conclusions regarding voting patterns in the Council by using either NOMINATE or the MCMC model when looking only at the order of governments' positions along the first dimension, the criticism of NOMINATE discussed in the first section is confirmed in the empirical results presented here. In particular, the failure to report standard errors causes somewhat misleading results and the MCMC output makes it clear that the order of governments' positions along the first dimension is not entirely accurate, at the same time as it is almost impossible to distinguish between some Council members' preference points. As a very last point for the further research agenda I should mention that the above Bayesian model is easily extended to include more empirically advanced information. As already explained, it is possible to add different effects to the specification, for instance in the form of party effects, vote trading or policy substance. 9 Future research may choose to include, for example, assumptions about policy dimensions, the location of extremist legislators, coalition configurations between certain governments or the evolution of the legislative agenda. In particular, the possibility of incorporating coalition formations or political signalling into the model, by making the utility of one legislator dependent upon either the utility or the voting behaviour of another, may be hugely interesting when considering the empirical findings presented in this research note. Furthermore, it is even possible to permit ideal point estimates to change over time by modelling the process associated with change. Thus, the Bayesian method can make the study of data from Council minutes a way to test theoretically interesting and more informed and sophisticated models of legislative behaviour than have been used in the Council setting so far. Together with more extensive data sets, this could certainly be considered a convincing way of solving some of the empirical and theoretical contradictions in the current literature and advancing our current knowledge.

Conclusion

In this research note I have discussed the literature engaged with the measurement of policy preferences in the Council. I have made one general recommendation and one specific suggestion regarding the further advancement of existing knowledge on this issue.

On a general note, it is necessary to make more use of the data that are already available from the Council. The current literature has certainly provided important insights into the institution, but much about the Council dynamics remains to be explored. The information already available from the Council makes it possible to conduct rigorous quantitative analyses across all legislative stages and procedures, and also to take into account formal statements as a means of voicing opposition. Hence, the way forward from the current position seems to be more quantitative tests of theoretical predictions; fortunately, this suggestion appears to be a motivation shared by many other scholars in the field.

My specific recommendation in this research note is related to the basic questions of how to address the issue of measuring governments' policy preferences and subsequently deriving inferences about the policy space within which the Council members act. These topics are of great importance to further research on legislative politics within the Council as well as in the inter-institutional setting and will most likely appear on the research agenda for a long time to come. The Bayesian model I presented in this research note provides a convincing method for addressing the issues. Unlike the densely estimated NOMINATE ideal points, a Bayesian model provides both individual ideal point estimates as well as standard errors around these estimates. The application of the two methods to a data set consisting of voting data from individual Council meetings and covering all legislation adopted by the Council from January 1999 to May 2004 showed that, owing to the high level of standard errors in the data from the Council, NOMINATE fails to identify correct ideal points for some governments. A Bayesian method is not affected by such characteristics and instead merely reports the ideal point estimates with large confidence intervals. Therefore, the Bayesian MCMC model presented in this research note performs better in terms of the accuracy of the ideal point estimates as well as when trying to assess the relative positions of governments positioned adjacent in the identified policy dimension. These characteristics are particularly valuable in view of the challenges posed by Council information, and I hope the results and suggestions made here can serve as an inspiration for new ways to address the measurement of preferences and conflict structures in the Council.

Notes

1 Hereafter referred to as 'the Council'. 2 http://www.europa.eu.int/prelex/apcnet.cfm?CL=en. See also http://www. europarl.eu.int/oeil/search.jsp. In order to follow the policy through the various steps in the process it is sufficient to know the COM reference number of the initial Commission proposal for the PreLex database, the complete title of the proposal or the inter-institutional file number for the public register of the Council. The inter-institutional file number will provide all the documents linked to the same proposal/dossier (also from working groups) and can be found through PreLex (when the COM number is known) or at the top of the page of a Council document. 3 In a forthcoming study I investigate the use of voting and formal statements before and after the 2004 enlargement. The findings are that, although the period immediately following the enlargement saw a decrease in opposition both through voting and through formal statements, the figures have been on the increase since the beginning of January 2005, particularly for formal statements. Please refer to my forthcoming report for the Centre for European Policy Studies, 'Decision-making in the Council of Ministers: An evaluation of the consequences of the 2004 enlargement', January 2007. 4 http://www.europarl.eu.int/oeil/search.jsp. 5 The following presents a brief and very simplified description of the basic, statistical model as developed by [START_REF] Clinton | The Statistical Analysis of Roll Call Data[END_REF]. For a more rigorous explanation and comparison with other ideal point estimation methods, please refer to their work. [START_REF] Jackman | Estimation and Inference Are Missing Data Problems: Unifying Social Science Statistics via Bayesian Simulation[END_REF] and [START_REF] Martin | Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953-1999[END_REF], too, provide important research on this issue. 6 The data set has been extended to include legislation from the post-2004 enlargement until November 2006, but, because the use of voting and formal rules has changed somewhat in the Council during this time, only the data from before the enlargement will be included here. 7 http://www.consilium.europa.eu. 8 The data were collected during my PhD studies at the London School of Economics and are used in the empirical chapters in my thesis 'Decision-making in the European Union's Council of Ministers', as well as in a number of research papers. The relevant data and commands for obtaining the results in this research note are available upon request from s.hagemann@lse.ac.uk. 9 See also [START_REF] Clinton | Agenda Constrained Legislator Ideal Points and the Spatial Voting Model[END_REF] on this last point.

Figure 2

 2 Figure 2Governments' ideal pointestimates, 1999estimates, -2004: NOMINATE. : NOMINATE.

Figure 3

 3 Figure 3Correlation between NOMINATE and MCMC estimations of governments' ideal points.

Table 1

 1 Data fit of NOMINATE

		NOMINATE:	NOMINATE:
	Dimension	cumulative % explained	APRE
	1	53.499	.611
	2	58.128	.442
	3	62.043	.463
	4	66.837	.679
	5	67.593	.628
	6	69.239	.702
	8	71.082	.641
	9	72.735	.502
	10	73.844	.546

European Union Politics 8(2)

About the author

Sara Hagemann is a policy analyst at the European Policy Centre, Rue des Menapiens, 38, B-1040 Bruxelles, Belgium. E-mail: s.hagemann@epc.eu