The Lisbon Treaty’s change to Council voting rules will have important implications for the democratic legitimacy of the EU

Many of the decisions made in the Council of the European Union are based on qualified majority voting, in which EU legislation can be passed if a certain threshold of support is met among member states. Frank Häge assesses the potential implications of the changes to qualified majority voting rules under the Lisbon Treaty, which came into force in November 2014. He notes that while the precise impact of the changes remains to be seen, they will have important ramifications for the overall legitimacy of the EU’s legislative process

Decisions made by consensus in the Council of the European Union emerge from the coalition-building behaviour of individual governments.

Despite the use of qualified majority voting, a high percentage of decisions in the Council of the European Union are still made by consensus. Frank Häge outlines a model which can potentially explain this phenomenon. He argues that the high numbers of decisions made by consensus are in fact an unintended by-product of coalition building within the Council: states band together to form blocking coalitions, with eventual decisions reflecting a compromise between these coalitions (and therefore a consensus between all states). This explains why decisions made by consensus are still extremely common, despite the EU enlargements which have taken place since the mid-1990s

EU Policy-Making: The Role of Working Parties in the Council of Ministers

Session 1: Governance in the European Unio

Data on political attention in the Council illustrates the EU’s failure to proactively address major crises

When government ministers meet in the Council of the European Union, what determines the level of attention they direct toward particular policy areas and issues? Based on recent research, Frank Häge illustrates how the Council has focused on different policy areas over time. He writes that one of the most striking trends to emerge from the data is the reactive nature of the Council with respect to managing the financial and migration crises, with both issues receiving relatively little attention until after each crisis began

Committee Decision-making in the Council of the European Union

Committees of national officials play a major role in the decision-making of the European Union's main legislative body, the Council of Ministers. The study investigates the conditions under which bureaucrats decide on legislative dossiers without direct involvement of ministers. A statistical analysis is performed to examine this question, using an original data set of 439 legislative proposals. The results of the analysis indicate that formal institutional features such as the voting rule in the Council and the involvement of the European Parliament affect committee decision-making, whereas no effects of committee socialization and preference divergence among member states are identified. The results diminish concerns about the democratic legitimacy of Council decision-making to some extent, as the findings demonstrate that bureaucrats tend to decide only the less salient and more complex proposals

Coalition building and consensus in the Council of the European Union

peer-reviewedAlthough qualified-majority voting is possible, member states in the Council of the European Union (EU) still adopt most policies by consensus. The agent-based model of coalition building in multilateral negotiations presented here addresses this puzzle. The model demonstrates that consensual decisions may emerge as an unintended by-product of government representatives' desire to form blocking coalitions. A qualitative case study demonstrates the plausibility of the model's assumptions and resulting coalition-building dynamics. Moreover, a quantitative test shows that the model's predictions correspond closely to the observed consensus rates. Finally, computational experiments predict a positive effect of the voting threshold but no effect of increases in membership on winning coalition size, which has important practical implications for institutional design and enlargement policy.ACCEPTEDpeer-reviewe

Selbsttäuschung - Kritische Auseinandersetzung mit Kenneth J. Gergens ´The Ethnopsychology of Self-Deception´

Die Arbeit diskutiert Kenneth J. Gergens Aufsatz ´The Ethnopsychology of Self-Deception´. Der Psychologe Gergen vertritt die Auffassung, das Konzept der Selbsttäuschung sei lediglich ein verfehltes Konstrukt der westlichen Kultur, das gleichwohl verschiedene Funktionen innerhalb der Gesellschaft erfülle. Diese Arbeit widerlegt Gergens Argumente und zeigt, dass sein kritischer Standpunkt als Ausdruck einer inexpliziten moralischen Intuition verstanden werden kann

Decision-making in the council of the European Union. The role of committees.

Many legislative decisions of the Council of the EuropeanUnion are de facto made in preparatory bodies by national officials anddiplomats. Ministers rubber-stamp these committee decisions without discussion.Drawing on statistical as well as case study evidence, the study investigatesthe extent to which this actually occurs. Based on a formal-theoreticaldiscussion of possible explanations, the study also examines the causes for whycertain decisions are made by committee members and others by ministers. Ingeneral, the empirical findings alleviate concerns about the democraticlegitimacy of Council decisions.LEI Universiteit LeidenThe politics and administration of institutional chang

Gross thermodynamics of two-component core convection

We model the inner core by an alloy of iron and 8 per cent sulphur or silicon and the outer core by the same mix with an additional 8 per cent oxygen. This composition matches the densities of seismic model, Preliminary Reference Earth Model (PR-EM). When the liquid core freezes S and Si remain with the Fe to form the solid and excess 0 is ejected into the liquid. Properties of Fe, diffusion constants for S, Si, 0 and chemical potentials are calculated by first-principles methods under the assumption that S, 0, and Si react with the Fe and themselves, however, not with each other. This gives the parameters required to calculate the power supply to the geodynamo as the Earth's core cools. Compositional convection, driven by light O released at the inner-core boundary on freezing, accounts for half the entropy balance and 15 per cent of the heat balance. This means the same magnetic field can be generated with approximately half the heat throughput needed if the geodynamo were driven by heat alone. Chemical effects are significant: heat absorbed by disassociation of Fe and 0 almost nullify the effect of latent heat of freezing in driving the dynamo. Cooling rates below 69 K Gyr(-1) are too low to maintain thermal convection everywhere; when the cooling rate lies between 35 and 69 K Gyr(-1) convection at the top of the core is maintained compositionally against a stabilizing temperature gradient; below 35 K Gyr(-1) the dynamo fails completely. All cooling rates freeze the inner core in less than 1.2 Gyr, in agreement with other recent calculations. The presence of radioactive heating will extend the life of the inner core, however, it requires a high heat flux across the core-mantle boundary. Heating is dominated by radioactivity when the inner core age is 3.5 Gyr. We, also, give calculations for larger concentrations of O in the outer core suggested by a recent estimation of the density jump at the inner-core boundary, which is larger than that of PREM. Compositional convection is enhanced for the higher density jumps and overall heat flux is reduced for the same dynamo dissipation, however, not by enough to alter the qualitative conclusions based on PREM. Our preferred model has the core convecting near the limit of thermal stability, an inner-core age of 3.5 Gyr and a core heat flux of 9 TW or 20 per cent of the Earth's surface heat flux, 80 per cent of which originates from radioactive heating

Assessment of Covalently Binding Warhead Compounds in the Validation of the Cytomegalovirus Nuclear Egress Complex as an Antiviral Target

Herpesviral nuclear egress is a regulated process of viral capsid nucleocytoplasmic release. Due to the large capsid size, a regular transport via the nuclear pores is unfeasible, so that a multistageregulated export pathway through the nuclear lamina and both leaflets of the nuclear membrane has evolved. This process involves regulatory proteins, which support the local distortion of the nuclear envelope. For human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), the nuclear egress complex (NEC) is determined by the pUL50–pUL53 core that initiates multicomponent assembly with NEC-associated proteins and capsids. The transmembrane NEC protein pUL50 serves as a multi-interacting determinant that recruits regulatory proteins by direct and indirect contacts. The nucleoplasmic core NEC component pUL53 is strictly associated with pUL50 in a structurally defined hook-into-groove complex and is considered as the potential capsid-binding factor. Recently, we validated the concept of blocking the pUL50–pUL53 interaction by small molecules as well as cell-penetrating peptides or an overexpression of hook-like constructs, which can lead to a pronounced degree of antiviral activity. In this study, we extended this strategy by utilizing covalently binding warhead compounds, originally designed as binders of distinct cysteine residues in target proteins, such as regulatory kinases. Here, we addressed the possibility that warheads may likewise target viral NEC proteins, building on our previous crystallization-based structural analyses that revealed distinct cysteine residues in positions exposed from the hook-into-groove binding surface. To this end, the antiviral and NEC-binding properties of a selection of 21 warhead compounds were investigated. The combined findings are as follows: (i) warhead compounds exhibited a pronounced anti-HCMV potential in cell-culturebased infection models; (ii) computational analysis of NEC primary sequences and 3D structures revealed cysteine residues exposed to the hook-into-groove interaction surface; (iii) several of the active hit compounds exhibited NEC-blocking activity, as shown at the single-cell level by confocal imaging; (iv) the clinically approved warhead drug ibrutinib exerted a strong inhibitory impact on the pUL50–pUL53 core NEC interaction, as demonstrated by the NanoBiT assay system; and (v) the generation of recombinant HCMV ∆UL50-ΣUL53, allowing the assessment of viral replication under conditional expression of the viral core NEC proteins, was used for characterizing viral replication and a mechanistic evaluation of ibrutinib antiviral efficacy. Combined, the results point to a ratelimiting importance of the HCMV core NEC for viral replication and to the option of exploiting this determinant by the targeting of covalently NEC-binding warhead compounds