Why Unanimity in the Council?

This article examines whether data on the voting patterns in the Council of Ministers lend support to the hypotheses that can be derived from some recent rational choice models of decision-making in the European Union. The findings show major discrepancies between the predictions of these spatial models and the empirical observations. Unanimous decision-making is much more frequent than one would expect from these influential contributions. Our empirical evaluation of the roll call patterns between 1994 and 1998 reveals furthermore that the probability of voting against the Council majority varies greatly between the Council members. Large countries are significantly more inclined to vote `no' than are their smaller counterparts. The multidimensional scaling analysis of voting coalitions indicates a north-south division in the Council.