In the Council of the European Union, many decisions are made using Qualified Majority Voting (QMV). The Council adopts a decision when the majority criterion is reached and a winning coalition is formed. We give an overview of the winning coalitions in the Council of the European Union using a dataset of contested decisions in the Council between 1998 and 2004, combined with our own data on the position of member states on a left-right dimension and a support for European integration dimension. We also indicate how close the policy positions of the winning coalitions are to the policy positions of the member states that participated in it. The analysis demonstrates that (1) most winning coalitions in the Council have a large combined voting weight, but about 25 percent of winning coalitions have a much smaller weight, (2) a minimal winning coalition is a rare phenomenon in the Council and ideological connectedness plays a smaller role than expected, and (3) a small group of member states, notably the United Kingdom, Finland, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal, participate in winning coalitions whose combined policy position on the left-right scale has a relatively small policy distance to their own policy positions.
