Publication

A dyadic method to investigate voting behaviour in the council of the European Union

This article presents a new dyadic approach to studying voting behaviour in the Council of the European Union, focusing on how differences between pairs of member states influence their voting alignment.

Author

Arash Pourebrahimi, Madeleine O Hosli, Jaroslaw Kantorowicz

Date

24 April 2025

Links

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The authors use a dataset of over 415,000 voting pairs from 1,154 legislative acts between 2010 and 2021 to explore how ideological, cultural, and integration-based policy differences affect agreement between states. By calculating policy distance using the ParlGov dataset and applying random effects logistic models, they show that larger differences, especially on EU integration, correlate with lower chances of voting similarity.

This innovative method sheds new light on cooperation and conflict in multilateral settings and offers broader relevance for other international organisations like the UN General Assembly.

• european union
• voting behaviour