Why Don’t Veto Players Use Their Power?

Abstract

Why do member states with veto power usually support 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, intertemporal and domain-specific logrolling can provide a powerful explanation for consensus even in a contested Council.

Money Makes theEUGo Round: The Objective Foundations of Conflict in theCouncil ofMinisters

“…This logrolling logic is, in our view, one of the reasons as to why a ‘culture of consensus’ (Heisenberg, ) supposedly governs Council interactions (Schneider, ) . For example, Aksoy (), but also König and Junge (), show that states trade votes frequently in the Council, especially in the presence of qualified majority hurdles and multidimensional decision‐making spaces. Finally, when a proposal reaches the final voting stage, the President of the Council has ensured that a majority of the Member States support it.…”

Institutional Arrangements and Logrolling: Evidence from the European Union

“…Legislators’ position changing behavior during the legislative process has been relatively unexplored in the literature. This is unfortunate given the wide range of studies that emphasize the prominence of logrolling during legislative negotiations in general (Carrubba and Volden 2000; Riker 1986; Riker and Brams 1973; Stratmann 1992) and position changes and logrolling during EU legislative negotiations in particular (Heisenberg 2005; König and Junge 2009; Matilla and Lane 2001; Stokman and den Bos 1994; Thomson et al 2006). However, an innovative dataset, Decision Making in the European Union (DEU), makes it possible to systematically study position changes and logrolling.…”

“…The initial positions also indicate the outcomes members ideally wanted to obtain in negotiations. In existing research conducted by scholars who collected the DEU data, the concepts “initial position” and “ideal position” are used interchangeably (Bailer 2004; König and Junge 2009). Moreover, in a special issue introducing the dataset, Stokman and Thomson (2004) note that the interviewed experts did not distinguish between the terms ``initial position'' and ``preference,'' suggesting that the experts do not consider a member’s initial position as an indicator of nonsincere position taking, but as an expression of the member’s actual preference.…”

“…Several studies utilize the DEU dataset (Aksoy 2010a; Arregui 2008; Arregui and Thomson 2009; Bailer 2004; König and Junge 2009; Pajala and Widgrèn 2004; Schalk et al 2007; Selck and Steunenberg 2004; Thomson 2008; Thomson and Hosli 2006; Thomson et al 2006; Warntjen 2008), with the main study being Thomson et al (2006). However, Arregui, Stokman, and Thomson (2004) and Arregui (2008) are the only studies that specifically study position changes using the dataset.…”

Institutional constraints, legislative activism and policy change: The case of the European Union

“…Second, this argument is applied to the case of the European Commission, where the study of legislative activism has generally been neglected – in spite of the fact that there is considerable variation over time in the level of new legislation initiated by the Commission (Häge ). Rather, the current literature on EU legislative activity has focused mainly on how various treaty reforms have influenced legislative output (Citi & Justesen ; Crombez & Hix ; König & Junge ; Tsebelis , , , ), the duration of the legislative process (Golub , ; Golub & Steunenberg ; Klüver & Sagarzazu ; König ) and the impact of enlargement on EU decision making (König ; König & Bräuninger ; Steunenberg ). However, this literature has not investigated in depth how legislative activism is influenced by the distance between the pivotal members of the EU legislature.…”