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Coalition Building and Consensus in the Council of the European Union

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2012

Frank M. Häge
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Abstract

Although qualified-majority voting is possible, member states in the Council of the European Union (EU) still adopt most policies by consensus. The agent-based model of coalition building in multilateral negotiations presented here addresses this puzzle. The model demonstrates that consensual decisions may emerge as an unintended by-product of government representatives’ desire to form blocking coalitions. A qualitative case study demonstrates the plausibility of the model's assumptions and resulting coalition-building dynamics. Moreover, a quantitative test shows that the model's predictions correspond closely to the observed consensus rates. Finally, computational experiments predict a positive effect of the voting threshold but no effect of increases in membership on winning coalition size, which has important practical implications for institutional design and enlargement policy.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , July 2013 , pp. 481 - 504
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Limerick (email: frank.haege@ul.ie). An earlier version of this article was presented at the Fifth Pan-European Conference on EU Politics, Porto, 2010. The author thanks the panel participants and the discussant Madeleine Hosli for useful comments and suggestions. Advice by three anonymous referees of this Journal is also gratefully acknowledged. Supplementary material is available in an online appendix at http://www.journals.cambridge.org/jps, and the NetLogo simulation model is available for download from www.frankhaege.eu.

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10 The time-period covered does not include the latest accessions of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007.

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