Empirical studies of voting behavior in the Council of the European Union have found that a number of ideological, institutional and macroeconomic variables explain variation in Member States’ propensities of voting against the majority in the Council. These variables include budget status, left-right location, accession date, support for EU membership, and holding the Council Presidency. In this paper, we consider three forms of expressing disagreement; ‘No’-votes, abstentions, and negative statements that are recorded in the Council minutes. In particular, we model a Member State’s decision-making process as a two-stage game. Member States first decide whether to express disagreement with a proposal. Next, those that express disagreement choose whether to make their disagreement public by means of ‘No’-votes, abstentions or negative statements. Furthermore, we conduct sequential logistic regression analyses on a dataset that includes 1,391 legislative acts, adopted between May 2004 and December 2014. We present evidence that the aforementioned variables explain variation in the propensity of expressing disagreement with a proposal rather than variation in the propensity of voting ‘No’. The level of Member States’ accountability towards their national parliaments, by contrast, explains the probability that they vote ‘No’, rather than abstain or issue a negative statement.
