The Under the Microscope project involves systematic analysis of documents that the European Commission publishes on its website. These documents include agendas of Commission meetings, minutes of Commission meetings, commissioners’ weekly activities reports, and others.

Members of the European Commission meet collectively roughly once each week. The Commission President sets the agenda for these collective meetings. The Commission’s Secretariat-General publishes the agenda (“Ordre du jour”) before each meeting.

The Secretariat-General references agendas in a form that includes the type of document (OJ) and the year and ordinal number of the meeting. Thus, the reference for the agenda of the Commission’s 2000^th meeting, which took place on January 2, 2012, is OJ(2012)2000.

Agendas are threadbare documents. They differentiate “A items” (e.g., items that have been settled by preparatory bodies and will not be discussed at any length during the meeting, unless a commissioner so requests) from “B items” (e.g., items that remain unsettled and/or require fuller discussion/deliberation by the collective commission). Some agendas also contain live hyperlinks to supporting documentation.

Minutes are not meeting transcripts, but they generally contain useful scalable information. The Secretariat-General’s system for referencing a minutes file (procès-verbal) mirrors the system for referencing agendas: the reference of the minutes file from the Commission’s 2000^th meeting is PV(2012)2000.

What can we learn from Commission meeting minutes?

Aggregated minutes files allow us to see which commissioners (fail to) attend weekly meetings. They help us to ascertain whether some commission presidents dominate the flow of collective business or defer to their colleagues more than others. They give us a window into the ways that different commissioners communicate their points. They show us which topics get discussed most frequently.

When we study meeting minutes as a large and ever-expanding textual corpus, we learn more about who leads the Commission, how they lead, how collegial the college of commissioners is, and how the scope and contents of Commission business develop over time.

What can’t we learn from Commission meeting minutes?

Meeting minutes exclude contentious substantive matters when individual commissioners ask such matters to be guarded from the public. In such cases, the Commission drafts “special meeting minutes.” These latter minutes are supplementary—they are included in a second, private file that can be accessed by commissioners. Members of the public cannot access special meeting minutes until 30 years have passed from their date of publication.

Approximately 54% of meetings result in a special meeting minutes file. Because these files are shielded from public access, they are not included in the “Under the Microscope” project.

How are Commission meeting minutes generated? 

What kind of information do Commission meeting minutes contain?

Over time, the structure of meeting minutes files has remained consistent. Each file contains:
1. A table of contents, including specific agenda items;
2. An attendance list;
3. A summary of who speaks and which actions are taken on all agenda items;
4. Basic structural information, including information about (a) which commissioners chair the Commission’s consideration of specific agenda items; (b) where meetings take place; and (c) when (e.g., what time of day) meetings are opened and closed.

How can information in the meeting minutes throw light on important aspects of Commission operations?

Tables of contents can provide information, for example, about the topics that the collective commission considers.

Attendance lists indicate whether some commissioners attend collective meetings more frequently than others.

Speaker summaries show the ways that particular commissioners participate in collective Commission business. Do they speak up or stay mum? What kinds of verbs do they use? Do they welcome the insights of fellow commissioners? Do they utilize more hierarchical or authoritarian speech patterns?

Structural information can illuminate the leadership characteristics of Commission presidents: How often do presidents delegate chairing responsibilities to colleagues? Do some commissions make greater use of special meeting minutes than others?

The project’s various online dashboards enable easy comparisons by allowing users to sort information by theoretically relevant categories—commission, member-state, role (e.g., vice-president), portfolio (e.g., economic and monetary affairs), European party group, year of commissioner’s birth.

Users can also download and integrate project data, with appropriate attribution, into their own analyses.

The Commission’s Directorate-General for Communication publishes a comprehensive list of commissioners’ upcoming activities in the days preceding most new weeks. Reports are referenced using the calendar (CLDR) classifier, the year, and a four-digit number. Thus, the weekly activities report for the week of November 23, 2015 is CLDR/15/6133.  

Weekly activities reports provide information about the stakeholders whom commissioners receive, the events in which commissioners participate, and the missions (e.g., travel) that commissioners undertake. Some reports contain hyperlinks to internal and/or external websites.