Published in European Union Politics 1/2001.
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Mikko Mattila Department of Political Science P.O. Box 54 FIN-00014 University of Helsinki Finland E-mail: mmattila@valt.helsinki.fi
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Jan-Erik Lane Department of Political Science University of Geneva Uni-Mail, 1211 Geneva Switzerland E-mail: Jan-Erik.Lane@politic.unige.ch.
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This article discusses how voting in the Council has been modelled within the rational choice approach using spatial models against an empirical enquiry into whether data on the voting in the Council lend support to these models. The findings concern discrepancies between the spatial model predictions and the empirical observations. Unanimous decision-making is much more frequent than one would expect from the model predictions. The enquiry into the roll call patterns between 1994-98 reveals furthermore that the probability of voting against the Council majority varies greatly between the Council members. Large countries are significantly more inclined to vote ‘No’ than their smaller counterparts. The multidimensional scaling analysis of voting coalitions indicates a north-south division in the Council.
Data for 1994: vote 1994.xls.
Data for 1995: vote 1995.xls.
Data for 1996: vote 1996.xls.
Data for 1997: vote 1997.xls.
Data for 1998: vote 1998.xls.
The source for the data is the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union (either yearly or monthly summaries). Please note that the 1994 data includes only "contested" decisions, i.e. decisions in which at least one Council member voted against the proposal or abstained from voting. Other files include all legislative decisions made by the Council.
If you intend to use this data in your analysis, please, let us know!
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