A Dyadic Method to Investigate Voting Behavior in the Council of the European Union

Abstracts Using a dyadic approach to explore voting behavior of European Union (EU) member states in the Council of the EU, we investigate the similarity in voting behavior of governments on three policy dimensions: left-right, authoritarian-libertarian, and pro-/anti EU. These policy dimensions are of interest also in other contexts, such as decision-making in international or regional organizations other than the EU. Our dependent variable is based on a new data collection covering the time 2010–2021. Our analysis, employing random effects binary and ordinal logistic regression applied to relations between EU states, confirms that larger distances of governments represented in the Council on these policy dimensions combined are related to larger distances of their vote choices. Larger distances affecting different vote choices within dyads are also confirmed for the pro-/anti EU policy dimension. Moreover, we find that closeness of member states in terms of their budget positions and of domestic public opinion on the EU are related to voting similarities. Member state differences in terms of voting power, by comparison, lead to less divergence of vote choice, for decisions based on the qualified majority voting rule. The length of EU membership, however, does not affect vote choice similarities.