Glimpsing Behind Closed Doors: Debates in the Council of the European Union

Analysing international negotiations is critical to our understanding of who succeeds on the international level and how representation of domestic interests works away from home. However, these meetings are commonly held behind closed doors, severely limiting our insights into them. We present DICEU+, a dataset of all public debates across all configurations of the Council of the European Union between 2011 and 2024, the most comprehensive dataset of intergovernmental negotiations to date. Using state-of-the-art audio transcription models, we create the dataset from publicly available videos of Council meetings. We then combine these speeches with information on speaker affiliation, negotiation stage, and legislative file under discussion. We present a comprehensive analysis of the quality of transcriptions. Substantively, we apply DICEU+ to study the transparency of the legislative process in the EU. Specifically, we estimate which negotiations are held publicly, which countries choose to publicly participate, and what share of the decision-making process is visible to citizens. Our work enables researchers to understand under what conditions parts of international negotiations become public and to study those with new data.