Alliance-Building to Influence the EU: Measuring the Geography of Mutual Support

Abstract

We assess a country’s influence on decision-making in the EU Council of Ministers not merely on the basis of the number of its votes, but based on a more refined measure that takes into account the voting behavior of other countries. A country that is likely to receive support from other countries will be more influential than a country with more votes, but which tends to be isolated in its policy preferences. We set out a novel quantitative methodology, which integrates the voting weight and the degree of support enjoyed by each country in one single measure, and we apply the methodology to a data set that is richer than existing data sets. We further use this measure (i) to assess whether the changes in voting weights from the Nice to the Lisbon Treaty have an influence on the odds whether countries get what they want when decisions are taken in the Council; and (ii) to study how these odds are affected by actor alignment in the Council.