This article explores voting patterns in the Council of the European Union between May 2004 and the end of December 2006, studying the full set of voting records for this institution. It analyses government vote choices in the Council on the basis of ordered logistic regression analysis, explaining the propensity of European Union (EU) Member States to vote 'yes', abstain from voting or vote 'no'. The article explains voting behaviour in the Council on the basis of selected independent variables -notably, governments' absolute and relative positions on the left-right policy dimension, support for European integration among domestic audiences, Member States' population size, and their positions as either net beneficiaries of or net payers into the EU budget. The empirical analysis reveals that voting behaviour is markedly different for the group of older EU Member States compared to its newer ones, with some of the explanatory variables even displaying opposite signs for these two groups in the statistical analyses. patterns of political contestation and cleavage structures in EU politics. We then go on to describe our data, as they have been collected from different sources, and provide an overview of how we measure the independent variables of our analysis. The section after that presents and discusses the results of our statistical analysis. Finally, we summarize the main findings and present our conclusions. I. Previous Research on Council Decision-MakingEarly analyses of Council voting records were conducted by Mattila (1998), Hosli (1999) and Mattila and Lane (2001). These first analyses were largely based on spatial models combined with descriptive accounts of decision-making. They were soon followed by studies that were more explanatory in nature. Mattila (2004) studied the reasons for EU states to choose specific voting options. He presented a range of hypotheses for Council members' voting behaviour and tested them with empirical data. In a similar analysis, Hagemann (2007) explored factors that could potentially influence Council voting behaviour. She used similar data, but her research accounted for different stages in the EU decision-making process.By comparison, Hayes-Renshaw et al. (2006) gave an in-depth analysis of Council voting patterns and assessed clusters among Member States indicating government voting behaviour in this institution. Plechanovová (2011), with data from different stages of the EU legislative process, explored voting patterns since the 2004 enlargement. Her empirical analysis reveals that there were no consistent patterns of coalition-building among EU governments in Council voting behaviour. Furthermore, her cluster analysis shows that, against common expectations, there were no given divisions in this institution when comparing the EU's 'new' Member States with its older ones.Various studies have explored policy dimensions that may be relevant to EU politics. For example, on the basis of an analysis of party manifestos by European parliamentary groups, Hix (1999) found tha...

What is the relative power of the European Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament (EP) in the European Union (EU)? Both scholars and practitioners of EU affairs provide different answers to this seemingly straightforward question. In this article, we examine the balance of power among these three actors in the context of legislative decision-making. We report the results of a small survey among a select group of practitioners of EU affairs. Their judgements on the relative power of the three organizations vary considerably. We distinguish between two contrasting views: a Council-centric view that attributes more power to the Council of Ministers than to the Commission and Parliament, and a supranational view that attributes large amounts of power to the supranational organizations relative to the Council. To test the veracity of these alternative views, we incorporate them into two variants of a simple and testable bargaining model that makes forecasts of decision outcomes, based on information on actors' preferences. The models are then applied to a dataset that includes information on EU actors' policy positions on 162 controversial issues of which the decision outcomes are known. The variant of the bargaining model incorporating the Council-centric view provides significantly more accurate forecasts.

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In the current debate on the future European order, the European Union (EU) is often described as an "emerging federation." This article claims that federalism is not exclusively useful in deliberating about the future of the EU. Non-statecentric conceptions of federalism provide a better understanding of the current structure and functioning of the European system of multilevel governance than most theories of European integration and international relations do. We combine political and economic perspectives of federalism to analyze the "balancing act" between effective political representation and efficient policy-making in the EU. Drawing on the examples of Germany and Switzerland in particular, we argue that the increasing delegation of powers to the central EU level needs to be paralleled by strengthened patterns of fiscal federalism and an empowered representation of functional interests at the European level. Without such "rebalancing," the current legitimacy problems of the EU are likely to intensify.

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Several member states of the European Free Trade Association have applied for admission into the European Community (EC). Paradoxically, enlarging the EC in this way will expand the voting power of Luxembourg, the smallest EC member state, in the EC Council of Ministers but diminish the power of the other states. In an EC with more members, voting by unanimity increasingly becomes an impractical decision-making procedure. As the Single European Act and possibly also the Treaty on European Union are being implemented, the distribution of EC council voting power takes on growing importance, since the range of issues to be decided by qualified majority votes increases considerably. Moreover, there are tendencies within the EC to render decision making more transparent and to publish member states' positions taken in majority votes. Thus, the distribution of voting power will increasingly be a crucial aspect for the EC.

This is an electronic version of an Article published in the Journal of common market studies, 42 (3) pp. 497-521

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