Oppositional voting in the Council of the EU between 2010 and 2019: Evidence for differentiated politicisation

Abstract

This article presents a new and previously unchartered dataset on roll call votes for all 28 member states in the Council of the EU between 2010 and 2019 and studies the effects of politicisation on governments' oppositional voting in the different policy areas. We contribute to the literature with two main findings. First, our study provides strong evidence for bottom-up politicisation, where Euroscepticism and the left-right positions of national political parties strongly affect governments' voting in the Council. Second, we provide new evidence for a form of differentiated politicisation where ideological standpoints of political parties in government and opposition have different effects on oppositional voting in the various policy areas.

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“… 8. This conforms to Pircher and Farjam’s (2021) finding that on economic and financial affairs Eurosceptic governments are somewhat likelier to formally dissent in the final Council vote, which may be a signal of their frustration with the Act (voting typically takes place after the Council presidency is satisfied that a qualified majority exists).…”

“…We specify Veto power as a proxy for veto power – the percent of the votes required to veto relevant Council decisions (see the Online appendix) – and a proxy for country size. To control for network capital, we specify Wealth – Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita in constant 2010 US dollars minus the EU annual average (Pircher and Farjam, 2021; data from the World Development Indicators , unavailable for pre-1970 Germany). Older member states may be more active in negotiations than newer ones because they have had more time to learn the complex EU bureaucracy and develop relevant skills.…”

“…Tenure is the logarithmic transformation of the number of years of membership in the EU. To account for agenda control, we include Presidency , which is a dummy for holding the rotating Council presidency (Pircher and Farjam, 2021). Elections and PreElections are country-year dummies.…”

“…Electoral competition between mainstream and Eurosceptic parties and the need it generates to be responsive to voters’ preferences in the next election (anticipatory representation; see Franchino et al, 2022; Hagemann et al, 2017) create a mechanism through which Euroscepticism is uploaded to EU-level policymaking. However, the politicization of European integration varies over time and place; thus, it is important to distinguish between popular Euroscepticism – resistance among the general public to European integration – and parliamentary Euroscepticism – the extent to which such attitudes are represented by parties in the legislature (Mariano and Schneider, 2022; Pircher and Farjam, 2021). Figure 2 demonstrates that parliamentary Euroscepticism tends to rise with popular Euroscepticism but the correlation between them, although statistically highly significant, is not very large (see the Online appendix for more details).…”