A consensus model in legislative decision‐making: The council of the European Union

Abstract The culture of consensus influences legislative decision‐making within the Council of the European Union, often leading to broad coalitions in which even the preferences of isolated member states are considered. Nevertheless, despite its significance, this culture has been insufficiently studied through formal models predicting EU legislative outcomes. This paper presents the Consensus model, a mixture of the procedural and bargaining approaches, accounting for the culture of consensus. This iterative model starts from the Commission's ideal stance and persists until no member state challenges a policy position, which then becomes the adopted outcome. The European Parliament contributes to shaping the trajectory from the Commission's proposal to the final result. Using the DEU‐III data set, I assess the Consensus model's predictive ability, demonstrating its superior performance compared to two random outcome models. Notably, the Consensus model performs on par with the Nash bargaining model.