Voting Behavior in the Council of the European Union after the 2004 Enlargement

This paper explores voting patterns in the Council of the European Union (EU) between May 2004 and the end of December 2006, studying the full set of voting records for this institution. It analyzes government vote choices in the Council on the basis of ordered logistic regression analysis, explaining the propensity of EU member states to vote ‘yes’, abstain from voting, or vote ‘no’. The paper explains voting behavior 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 or net payers into the EU budget. Our empirical analysis reveals that voting behavior is markedly different for the group of the EU’s older as compared to its newer member states, with some of our explanatory variables even displaying opposite signs for these two groups in our statistical analyses