The impacts of domestic politicisation on Council voting: New publication by Brigitte Pircher
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. Its contributes to the literature with two main findings. First, the 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, it provides new evidence for a form of differentiated politicisation where ideological standpoints of political parties either directly driven by governments or indirectly channelled through oppositions – depending on the policy area – substantially affect voting in the Council.
Decision-making in the Council of the EU is no longer characterized by a depoliticised consensus culture. Brigitte Pircher explains what has changed in a blog post drawing upon her recent research.