This is the second in a series of articles on whether the UK is marginalised in EU decision-making. The first piece looked at the positions of the UK government in relation to policy outcomes and found that, on average, the UK was closer to EU outcomes than most other EU governments.

In this piece we look at the actual voting records in the Council of the European Union and ask a slightly different question: how often is the UK outvoted in the main EU legislative institution?

The data comes from VoteWatch.eu plus information we collected ourselves from 2004-09. For full disclosure, we are two of the co-founders of VoteWatch and members of its board. The data set includes all votes that took place in the council between 1 July 2004 and 1 September 2015.

Formally, the ministers of the EU governments, who meet in the council according to their policy portfolios, vote on all legislative decisions and most votes are taken by a “qualified majority vote”.

In practice though, the majority of decisions are agreed by consensus, meaning ministers work together to seek an agreement that all countries can support. As a result, most votes are recorded with either none or only a few countries opposing.

However, opposition comes in two forms: a government either formally records a no vote, or chooses to abstain. We hence count both abstention and negative votes as a failure to publicly support a majority view.

EU council votes

So what does the evidence tell us about a possible marginalisation of the UK in the council?

Figure 1 shows the percentage of times that each government has been in a losing minority as a proportion of all votes in 2004-09 and 2009-15.

Two things are striking:

• There was a big increase in the level of conflict in the council between 2004-09 and 2009-15.



• The UK government was on the losing side a much higher proportion of times in 2009-15 compared with 2004-09 (2.6% in the former period and 12.3% in the latter).



The next most frequently “losing” governments, Germany and Austria, were only on the minority side 5.4% of the time in 2009-15. However, one thing to note is the high level of agreement in both periods: the UK voted on the winning side 97.4% of the time in 2004-09 and 86.7% of the time in 2009-15.

Digging further into the 2009-15 data, we can see which other governments tend to vote with the UK.

As the graphic below shows, the UK’s main allies were some of our northern neighbours – Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark – while the German government was the least likely to vote with the UK. In fact, the UK and German governments voted on opposite sides 16% of the time.

In other words, the two governments most likely to vote against the majority (the UK and Germany) were often in opposition on different votes.

UK allies votes

These aggregate patterns might be distorted by the fact that there were more votes on some policy issues than on others, with the UK opposed only in areas that happened to have many votes.

As the graphic below shows, the UK voted against the majority more frequently on budgetary policies, foreign and security policy, and international development.

The UK voted with the majority more frequently on international trade, industry, environment, transport, legal affairs, economic and monetary union, and internal market policies.

But in most policy areas, the UK was again the member state most likely to vote against the majority, and substantially more likely than the average government in the EU. The UK was not the most oppositional government on the internal market, legal affairs, transport, environment, and fisheries.

Image: Simon Hix

Image: Simon Hix

Finally, the above graphic shows the UK numbers in comparison with the other two largest member states: Germany and France.

Broadly speaking, France almost never voted against the majority, preferring to accept a consensual outcome even when it might have opposed the majority view.

The German government was more often on the losing side than the UK government on environment and transport, and was as frequently against the majority as the UK on employment and social affairs, internal market, and fisheries.

In short, the official voting records suggest there has been a significant shift in the position of the UK government between 2004-09 and 2009-15.

In the latter period the UK has voted more often against the majority, and is hence now in the minority more often than any other EU government. There is some variance across policy areas, the UK has some powerful allies, and Germany also often votes against the winning majority.

But on average, the data suggests the UK government has at times had to accept policy outcomes from the EU for which it was not part of the winning majority.

However, there are some important caveats to keep in mind:

• The council overwhelmingly decides by consensus, which means the UK is on the winning majority side almost 87% of the time.



• The UK government might be more willing than other governments to publicly register its opposition to EU decisions.



• The data does not tell us what went on behind the scenes on each of these issues, and hence how much the UK disagreed with the majority position when it recorded its opposition – perhaps the UK was on the winning side on all the key issues it really cared about in this period.



For a complete picture, this evidence needs to be put together with other evidence from the policy process, such as whether a government actually gets the policies it wants (the subject of the first post in this series), and whether the UK is marginalised in the other main legislative body: the European parliament (which will be addressed in future posts).

Simon Hix is Harold Laski professor of political science at the London School of Economics and Political Science and senior fellow on the Economic and Social Research Council’s UK in a Changing Europe programme.

Sara Hagemann is assistant professor in European politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science.