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- W2364844037 abstract "ly defined dimensions, experts may have fundamentally different understandings of what these dimensions mean (ibid.). In the present study, by contrast, experts are asked to place actors on specifically defined controversies, not abstract dimensions. Likewise, when expert judgements refer to the positions of corporate actors, such as political parties or member states, there may be ambiguity regarding which individuals in these corporate actors the judgements refer to. This limitation is not inherent in the method itself, but in the way in which it is applied. The present study is explicit in defining these questions, as will be detailed further in Section 2.5 below. The approach to expert judgements applied in the present study relies on a relatively small number of experts who are interviewed face-to-face and required to 32 justify the information they provide substantively. This approach is quite distinct from the use of expert judgements in other subfields of political science. For instance, several studies have used standardized surveys to obtain judgements from a large number of individuals on political parties’ positions on general dimensions of conflict in domestic politics (e.g. Huber and Inglehart 1995, Laver and Hunt 1992; Benoit and Laver 2006). The approach used here is preferable in the present context because this study focuses on controversies raised by each of the selected legislative proposals. We need detailed discussions with experts to find out what exactly was controversial about these proposals. Moreover, given that decision-making in the Council of ministers is not open to the public, the information we require is often perceived to be of a sensitive nature. Few experts would be willing to divulge this information in a standardized questionnaire to researchers whom they have not met personally. In face-to-face interviews, interviewers assess the expertise of interviewees and the amount of effort interviewees devote to providing estimates. Throughout the semi-structured interviews, interviewers asked respondents to justify the information they gave. The guiding questions for these justifications were ‘why did each of the actors favour the alternatives they did?’ and ‘why did the actors prioritize the issues as they did? (Thomson and Stokman 2006: 32). Respondents’ answers to these questions and the knowledge they displayed of the proposal in question were used to gauge their expertise and the credibility of their estimates. The numerical representations of actors’ positions are not averages of the estimates provided by different experts. When necessary, researchers made a judgement about which sets of estimates to include based on respondents’ answers. For instance, one expert may have been uncertain about a particular member state’s policy position on one of the controversial issues. If this was the case, other experts were consulted to confirm or provide this information. Interviewing experts to obtain information on controversial issues and actors’ positions on those issues is more challenging with twenty-five or twenty-seven member states than it is with fifteen member states. We endeavoured to stay as close as possible to the procedures we applied in the EU-15 study, so as to ensure the comparability of the data, but some practical adjustments to the research design were necessary. In particular, it was necessary to interview a larger number of experts on each legislative proposal in the post-2004 study before we felt sufficiently confident about the estimates. We increasingly encountered some ‘blind spots’ in our 33 respondents’ knowledge of actors’ positions, whereby they were unsure about the positions of some actors on some of the issues. Whenever this was the case, we interviewed other experts to obtain more certainty. Compared to the EU-15 study, the interviews in the post-2004 study were more explicitly cumulative. In the EU-15 study, in each interview the researcher generally attempted to define the issues and collect the expert’s judgements of actors’ positions and the levels of importance they attached to the issues. If we had different sets of experts’ judgements regarding the same proposal, we selected the set of estimates from the expert who displayed the most detailed knowledge of the proposal and the strongest ability to translate this knowledge into quantitative estimates. In the post-2004 study, we would generally obtain a complete or partly complete set of estimates from one expert, and then present this to another expert in the next meeting and so on. The next expert was asked whether they agreed with the estimates from the previous interview. Where they differed, the new experts were asked to substantiate their estimates and the researchers then decided which one to follow by comparing the justifications given. If this was unclear, more interviews were conducted. The experts were affiliated with different institutions: the European Commission, the member states’ permanent representations and the European Parliament. The individuals in the European Commission were usually the officials responsible for drafting the legislative proposals. These individuals also monitored closely the discussions that took place in the Council and EP. The officials from member states’ representations were desk officers responsible for representing their states in the Council discussions. The officials from the Commission and Council invariably had detailed knowledge of the Commission and member states’ policy positions on the main controversies raised by the proposal in question. In addition, they had detailed information on the positions taken by the EP in the interinstitutional negotiations. Few experts from the EP were interviewed in the EU-15 study. This is because decision-making within the EP fell outside the scope of that study; the EP was treated throughout as a unitary actor. Whenever we contacted individuals within the EP in the EU-15 study, they were unable to provide the detailed information we required on member states’ policy positions. For part of the post-2004 study, as will be discussed in Section 2.6, data were gathered on the policy positions of the party groups, and where relevant national groups within the EP. This part of the study was led by Rory Costello (2009). To obtain information on the positions of 34 actors within the EP, Costello interviewed MEPs, their legislative assistants and EP committee officials. Box 2.1 Tests of the accuracy of expert judgements Two previous publications tested the accuracy of the expert judgements used in the present study (Thomson 2006; Konig et al. 2007). More precisely, we can distinguish between the validity and the reliability of expert judgements. A measure’s validity can be assessed by the extent to which the estimates obtained by applying this measure correspond to the estimates obtained by applying an alternative measure of the same construct to the same cases. The reliability of a measure refers to the extent to which repeated applications of the same measure to the same cases yield the same estimates. Thomson (2006) assessed the validity of the expert judgements by comparing expert judgements with information from documentation on Council decision-making on two cases: the directive on the manufacturing and sale of tobacco products (COD/1999/244) and the directive on resale rights for artists (COD/1996/085). The documents contained uncensored drafts of the legislative texts that detailed member states’ objections to articles within these proposed laws. The comparison of the expert judgements and the documents revealed that the experts’ issues were indeed the main controversies. From the documentary information I identified the articles in the proposed laws to which states objected. For both legislative proposals, I compared the controversial articles from the documents that related to the experts’ issues with the controversial articles from the documents that did not relate to the experts’ issues. The documentary evidence showed that more member states took positions on the related articles than the unrelated ones. In addition, the related articles took longer to resolve and were discussed at higher levels of the Council’s hierarchy. The comparison of documents with expert judgements also supported the validity of the experts’ judgements of actors’ policy positions. For the tobacco products directive, there was a high level of agreement between experts’ judgements of states’ positions and the documentary information; forty-eight of fifty-three positions matched perfectly. On the resale rights directive, only eighteen of the fifty-seven positions that could be compared matched. This lower level of agreement showed the limitation of the" @default.
- W2364844037 created "2016-06-24" @default.
- W2364844037 creator A5090546782 @default.
- W2364844037 date "2011-01-01" @default.
- W2364844037 modified "2023-09-27" @default.
- W2364844037 title "Resolving Controversy in the European Union: Inputs, Processes and Outputs in Legislative Decision-Making before and after Enlargement" @default.
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