Voting in the Council of the European Union after the 2004 Enlargement: A Comparison of Old and New Member States

Abstract

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...

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