Public deliberations in the Council of the European Union: Introducing and validating DICEU

Abstract

The Council of the European Union is the European Union’s most powerful legislative body. Yet, we still have limited information about Council politics because of the lack of suitable data. This paper validates a new approach to studying Council politics entitled DICEU – Debates in the Council of the European Union. This approach is the first to leverage the public videos of Council deliberations as a data source. We demonstrate the face, convergent, and predictive validity of DICEU data. Governments’ ideal points scaled from these videos yield meaningful and well-known conflict dimensions. Moreover, governments’ positions during Council negotiations correlate highly with expert assessments and predict subsequent votes on legislative acts. We conclude that DICEU data provide a promising new approach to studying Council politics and multilevel governance.