Voting, Statements and Coalition-Building in the Council from 1999 to 2006

Abstract

The increasing accessibility of Council documents has resulted in a rapidly growing literature on EU members’ behaviour, preferences and incentives when negotiating and adopting new legislation. Existing quantitative studies concerned with these topics draw on either interview-based datasets or on records of roll-call voting. This chapter presents a range of new findings based on a dataset which resembles the roll-call information included in the existing literature. Only, here the data consist not only of the final stage votes usually included in roll-call analyses of the Council, but also contain the governments’ recorded positions at prior stages of the legislative process as noted in the minutes of individual Council meetings. Furthermore, the dataset also includes information on oppositions recorded as formal statements following the adoption of a decision. Formal statements are usually included in the minutes and often consist of one or a number of governments’ serious concerns or disagreement with a policy proposal. But these governments may choose not to oppose the decision through voting. When looking into the data it seems, therefore, as if the recorded formal statements reflect a two-sided game by governments: by differentiating between voting and formal statements governments are able to adopt legislation while still sending a political signal of preserving their preferences in the formal statements recorded in the minutes.