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Why Don’t Veto Players Use Their Power?

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Reform Processes and Policy Change

Part of the book series: Studies in Public Choice ((SIPC,volume 16))

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Abstract

Why do the member states with veto power usually support a policy change proposed by a Commission initiative when their own position is located closer to the status quo? Why do we frequently witness consensus in the Council and rarely observe a rejection of Commission initiatives even after additional veto players, such as new member states or the European Parliament, have increased the constraints on policy change by legislative decision making in the European Union (EU)? To answer these questions, this study investigates the voting preferences and logrolling opportunities of the member states on 48 Commission proposals. We find that models that derive the voting preferences from each Commission initiative are scarcely able to explain the consensus in the Council. One reason is that the Commission attempts to avoid a divided Council by initiating proposals for which member states favour a policy change in the same direction. When member states still dispute the size of policy change, we show that they can find a solution by mutually benefiting from logrolling across proposals that either belong to the same policy domain or are negotiated during the same period. Hence, inter-temporal and domain-specific logrolling can provide a powerful explanation for consensus even in a contested Council.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The data set for the empirical analysis in this article can be found at http://eup.sagepub.com/supplemental. By voting preferences, we mean the relative distance between the status quo and an actor’s ideal position and between the proposed change and his/her ideal position. This preference is measured by the actor’s position in multidimensional policy spaces weighted by his/her relative saliency across dimensions. If the difference between the two distances is negative, the actor is predicted to vote in favour of the status quo; otherwise, he/she supports the proposed change.

  2. 2.

    In the period under study, 62 out of 87 total votes are needed for the adoption of a Commission proposal under the qualified majority rule in the Council. The Treaty of Amsterdam provided Germany, Italy, France and the United Kingdom with ten votes, Spain with eight votes, Austria, Belgium, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden with four votes and Denmark, Ireland and Finland with three votes, while Luxembourg has only two votes.

  3. 3.

    To guarantee some public awareness and controversy, proposals have been selected for the study only if they had been mentioned in the Agence Europe, a news service for EU affairs, and revealed at least a minimum level of conflict in the interviews (Thomson et al. 2006).

  4. 4.

    In a recent study, König et al. (2006) checked the reliability of CELEX data using PreLex – another EU legislative database PreLex – and found that more than 90% of all cases correspond across these different sources of information, although PreLex documents the legislative process, CELEX contains legislative events.

  5. 5.

    Comparing the DEU with data on seven cases negotiated in the conciliation committee, they find a surprisingly high similarity regarding the point locations of the EP, the Commission, the status quo, the outcome and the Council pivot. Although most experts were rapporteurs, the DEU experts came primarily from the Council, and although these experts were asked at different points in time, the point location of 15 positions is the same (deviation of 0–5 on a scale ranging from 0 to 100), 13 positions are very close (deviation of 6–25), 4 positions are not comparable owing to missing values and only 3 measures indicate a large deviation (50, 50 and 70). Closer inspection of these three deviating cases reveals that two of them list a slight Council qualified majority position and the minority position is again almost identical with the Council estimate. This suggests that the Council may have introduced the minority position in the bargaining of the conciliation process (König et al. 2007).

  6. 6.

    Note that voting predictions are not affected by voting weights (in contrast to outcome predictions); we therefore do not distinguish between predictions with and without voting weights with respect to voting predictions in the table.

  7. 7.

    In EU legislation, under QMV abstention is de facto a vote against a proposal, whereas under the unanimity rule it supports adoption.

  8. 8.

    This particularly applies in the framework of deterministic models.

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Acknowledgement

This chapter is a reprint of an article entitled ‘Why Don’t Veto Players Use Their Power?’ by Thomas König and Dirk Junge, which originally appeared in European Union Politics (2009) 10:507–534.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mannheim University, Mannheim, Germany

    Thomas König & Dirk Junge

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  1. Thomas König
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  2. Dirk Junge
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Correspondence to Thomas König .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, 68131, Germany

    Thomas König

  2. Mannheim Center for European Research, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, 68131, Germany

    Marc Debus

  3. Dept. Political Science, University of Michigan, S. State St. 505, Ann Arbor, 48109-1045, USA

    George Tsebelis

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König, T., Junge, D. (2011). Why Don’t Veto Players Use Their Power?. In: König, T., Debus, M., Tsebelis, G. (eds) Reform Processes and Policy Change. Studies in Public Choice, vol 16. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5809-9_8

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