This article evaluates member states’ and supranational institutions’ preference patterns in European Union decision-making. We present a research design that encompasses data on the policy profiles of the 15 member states, the Commission, and the European Parliament for 70 European legal acts that were negotiated just before the May 2004 enlargement. We apply principal-component analysis which results in reduction of the different policy issues into a three-dimensional solution. The Commission and the European Parliament are much more favorable toward increased integration than the Council members are. Thus, there appears to be a “north versus south” coalition pattern rather than a “Franco-German axis.” The positions of Ireland and Belgium indicate that the member states’ status as net contributors or net receivers of European Union subsidies are important. Our findings do not support the pro-less integrationist argument nor the left-right dimension that reconciles economic and sociopolitical issues.

In this article I test spatial models of European Union (EU) legislative decisionmaking regarding the dimensionality of the policy space. After clarifying the concept of dimensionality, I review the existing literature. I then map out possible ways to test these models based on different dimensionality assumptions. Using quantitative data on actor positions for EU legislative politics, I .rst employ dimension-reducing techniques. The results show that this technique is not appropriate for generating a decreased number of underlying dimensions for the data at hand and that a one- or two-dimensional European policy space cannot be detected. Shifting to more theory-based analysis, I calculate the predicted outcomes for voting models of the EU under different spatial con.gurations. The findings show that the formal models’ predictive power increases with the use of multi-dimensional policy spaces. I conclude by interpreting these findings in the light of a more general debate on evaluating the decision space assumed bymodels of group decision-making.

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