Alternative Explanations

According to Rebecca Morton (1999:101) an empirical evaluation is not complete without an evaluation of alternative models. Such evaluations are also advocated by Cardie and Wilkerson (2008:3). They stress that the model‟s performance should always be compared to one or more baseline systems, and suggest that this may be a system that always guesses the most frequent category. In the case of the formal model

of this thesis, this will be the “yes” vote category. How does the simple spatial model perform in comparison to a “yes”-model? If we have a look at the simple spatial model‟s aggregative performance (table 5.1) it is clear that a competing model that only predicts positive votes will predict the wrong outcome 32 of 555 times (just 5,8%). This may suggest that the alternative model will perform better than the model tested in this thesis, and hence explain the voting behaviour in the Council in a more valid manner. But this is not a clear cut-picture. The recall- and precision percents (of the alternative model) that illustrate the exactness/completeness of the negative votes will both be undetected (--), and a “yes”-model will hence perform even more poorly than the preference-based model of this thesis. When exploring the voting behaviour of the Council the negative votes and negative statements are just as important, if not even more important, than the positive outcomes. This because opposition in general is quite rare, making it interesting to explore the reasons and mechanisms behind the negative statements, and in order to do so opposition has to be detected by the formal model.

Arguments that support the explanatory force of the “yes” model have often been raised in the Council literature, and the Council is often attributed a so-called “Culture of Consensus” suggesting that decisions are rarely contested at the final stage of decision-making. Heisenberg (2005:81) points out that consensus facilitates

bargaining, keeps the typically “nationalistic” issues out of the public mind (at least in many circumstances), encourages compliance, compensates losers and avoids the tyranny of the large states as well as the overweighting of small countries‟ interests.

The history of accommodating special problems of the member states, as illustrated by the “Luxembourg compromise”, may be a part of a rather functional working method that facilitates consensus as the prevailing method of decision-making. But focus on such a norm may camouflage the actual level of conflicts and contestation in the Council. There are a variety of reasons for the seemingly consensual voting outcomes of the Council. Among one of them is the role of the Commission. The Commission exercises some sort of self-censorship by not sending proposals to the Council that are likely not to be accepted at all or that are highly controversial (Heisenberg 2005:71).

Table 5.6. summarises some of the factors that may explain the low level of contestation at the final stage of decision-making:

Table 6-1 A summary: What may have contributed to create the consensual bias in the Council?¹⁸

Explanations How?/some examples

The history The Luxembourg compromise, the Ionannina compromise, emergency brakes.

Time frame attached to negotiations

The Takeover Directive: 15 years of labour before reaching the voting records.

(Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace 2006).

Incomplete voting records

A downward bias: disagreement voiced at the preparatory stages + lack of data on failed proposals. Governments show opposition only in cases that are of high salience to them (Mattila 2004).

Accommodations of special needs

Achieved to declarations in the Council Minutes and often attached to decisions that are taken by consensus. Examples: Exceptions, differentiated rules, longer or shorter time delays or transitions (Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace 2006).

Vote trading May be likely in the EU because the possibility of multiple games facilitating trust and issue-linkages (Mattila and Lane 2001).

Formal statements A form of voicing opposition without impeding the traditional consensus, show some sort of “national pride”. This thesis includes formal statements in the analyses.

Voting rules The rules do matter, the consensus affected by the rules applied.

5/7 of the Council has to agree on a proposal (under QMV) in order for it to reach the voting records, even so extended use of QMV may “shake” the consensual mode of decision-making.

Decision-making procedures

The more reliance on Co-decision (II), the more united the Council has to be in order to “win” over the EP (Hix 2005).

Organisational structure within the Council

Prestige to settle agreements before the ministerial level, COREPER and the working parties oiling the machinery and facilitate consensus (Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace 2006)

If we evaluate the simple spatial model against the consensus norm (that can be illustrated as a “yes”-model) and interpret the consensus norm as an alternative hypothesis from nonformal theorizing (as advocated by Morton (1999:275), it seems like the consensus norm ignores effects that, when incorporated, can lead to different predictions. The summary of some of the factors that may contribute to uphold the consensual bias in the Council may in fact disguise the real level of contestation in the

18 This table is partly taken from Wøien Hansen (2008).

Council. Hence a model, that only explains the positive votes, lacks the ability to give a nuanced picture of the voting behaviour of each Council member and the decision-making processes of the Council in general. But it is also to be said that the consensual bias of the Council may justify some of the difficulties the simple spatial model

experiences when it tries to predict the extent- and accuracy of the negative statements.

Thomson and Stokman (2003:20) emphasis that there is a clear distinction between actors‟ most favoured policy alternatives and the policy alternatives that they were willing to accept or eventually accepted in the form of the decision outcome. The results of this thesis may suggest that the compromise mentality, in many cases, may be stronger than the individual preferences of each Council member.

The preference for consensus and the fact that the Council goes to great lengths to accommodate each member state in the decision outcomes may together with the simple spatial model illustrate the voting behaviour of the Council in a more

comprehensive and valid way. By combining the model and the consensus norm as well as its underlying effects for decision-making, it is possible both to explain and predict the negative votes/statements and to explain the low level of opposition within the Council. In relation to this, Schneider et al. (2006:304) emphasis that the so called bargaining perspective is more successful in predicting outcomes than other models considered in Thomson et al. (2006). They advocate that the reason for this is that unanimity is a strong norm in EU legislation, even when the legislation processes are subjected to QMV voting. Bargaining theory suggests that positions should be taken as strategic choices rather than raw preferences, and thus manages to incorporate the consensual mode of decision-making into its modelling. Such models may hence explain voting behaviour in the Council better than the model presented in this thesis.