Debates in the Council of the European Union (DICEU): A New Dataset

For decades the Council of the European Union has been a secretive institution and datasets on governments' behavior in the Council are therefore still rare and complex to collect. We present a novel data collection strategy on Council politics based on video footage of the public deliberations of the Council. Since 2006 almost all legislative deliberations in the Council are video-taped and made public. We demonstrate how policy issues and related actor positions can be retrieved from this source by human coders and quantitative text analysis of speeches. We illustrate the key features of our approach with Bayesian item-response and text-based ideal point estimations of governments in the ECOFIN Council between 2011 and 2015. In addition, we assess the approach's reliability and its convergent validity with existing voting data as well as expert data on Council politics. Studying the Council on the basis of public deliberations presents a fruitful new research strategy that is particularly suited for times of EU politicisation, as the Council increasingly turns into a "normal" legislature with a "public face" complementing its back-door politics.