This pathbreaking book illuminates the politics of issue resolution within the European Community with evaluations and comparisons of competing models of decision making across twenty-two policy issues. Written by American and Dutch scholars, the book will be of great interest to students of comparative politics, public policy analysts, mathematic modelers, and all those concerned with the development of the European Community. One set of models explored in this volume - the expected utility model - treats politics as a conflictual activity, while the other, the exchange or log rolling model, emphasizes the cooperative nature of political processes. The alternative approaches model decision making in fundamentally different ways and make very different predictions about how issues in the European Community will be resolved. To facilitate direct comparison of their predictive and explanatory value, the models in this volume are based on the same variables: the potential control of actors over outcomes, the salience of the issues for the actors, and the outcomes preferred by the actors. The contributors test their models in the context of sixteen issues already resolved by the Council of Ministers and six issues currently under consideration, providing the reader with considerable knowledge about the controversies surrounding European Community policy on such topics as automobile emissions, nuclear radiation norms, air transport liberalization, and the European banking system. They conclude that the conflictual model and the cooperative model are less competitive and more complementary than has been thought, and they explain in detail how the models can be fruitfully combined.

European legislation affects countless aspects of daily life in modern Europe but just how does the European Union make such significant legislative decisions? How important are the formal decision-making procedures in defining decision outcomes and how important is the bargaining that takes place among the actors involved? Using a combination of detailed evidence and theoretical rigour, this volume addresses these questions and others that are central to understanding how the EU works in practice. It focuses on the practice of day-to-day decision-making in Brussels and the interactions that take place among the Member States in the Council and among the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament. A unique data set of actual Commission proposals are examined against which the authors develop, apply and test a range of explanatory models of decision-making, exemplifying how to study decision-making in other political systems using advanced theoretical tools and appropriate research design.

European legislation affects countless aspects of daily life in modern Europe but just how does the European Union make such significant legislative decisions? How important are the formal decision-making procedures in defining decision outcomes and how important is the bargaining that takes place among the actors involved? Using a combination of detailed evidence and theoretical rigour, this volume addresses these questions and others that are central to understanding how the EU works in practice. It focuses on the practice of day-to-day decision-making in Brussels and the interactions that take place among the Member States in the Council and among the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament. A unique data set of actual Commission proposals are examined against which the authors develop, apply and test a range of explanatory models of decision-making, exemplifying how to study decision-making in other political systems using advanced theoretical tools and appropriate research design.