This paper aims to study the extent to which policy positions are a good predictor of voting behavior within the European Council by measuring how much governments deviate from their positions when voting on the final decision. The main idea is to examine whether there are voting patterns in the Council that identify member states opposing more (or less) frequently to legislative proposals. More relevantly, this paper aims to test the conditions and the explanatory factors under which such voting behaviour takes place in the European Council So far, literature has shed light on both the bargaining process (Golub 1999; Lewis 2000, 2003; Arregui et al. 2006) and on voting behavior in the Council (Mattila 2004, 2009; Mattila and Lane 2001; Heisenberg 2005; Hagemann and Hoyland 2008). For example, research has shown that the Council has a preference for finding a final decision that is acceptable for all member states although there is often a tendency for some member countries to oppose to the majority. However, no research has been done so far on the interaction between both bargaining and voting behaviour. Indeed, voting behavior cannot be fully understood without taking into account the stages that precede voting on the Council´s final decision. The present research will combine positional data on 291 issues on 111 legislative proposals (including directives, regulations and decisions) with voting data on each of those legislative instruments. This data was collected by the DEU group in the pre-enlargement period and by Thomson, Leuffen and Arregui in the post-enlargement period. This data set covers legislation from 1996 to 2010.
