Title: Cheap dates and the delusion of gratification: are votes sold or traded in the EU Council of Ministers?
Abstract: Abstract Each year, small Member States receive a disproportionate share of the European Union's (EU's) budget. A prominent explanation for this is that Council decision-making involves a healthy dose of vote selling, whereby large Member States offer small states generous fiscal transfers in exchange for influence over policy. But nobody has investigated whether net budget contributors actually get anything for their money. In this paper I identify the vote selling model's observable implications and find virtually no evidence consistent with Council cash-for-votes exchanges. I also show that a compromise model – the leading model of EU decision-making to date – modified to incorporate vote selling does not outperform a standard one that assumes votes are traded rather than sold. Taken together, the results suggest that Council decision-making operates with little or no vote selling, and that regardless of whatever they think they might be buying, net budget contributors get little or nothing in return for their money. These findings call for further investigation into how Member States approach the issue of fiscal transfers, and into the factors other than formal voting weight that affect the power of actors engaged in EU decision-making. Keywords: Budgetcompromisedecision-makingEuropean Unionfiscal transfersvote trading ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Veerle Heyvaert, seminar participants at INSEAD business school and the University of Reading, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Notes This system will apply until 2014, after which, in light of the changes introduced by the Lisbon Treaty, a QMV will require 55 per cent of all Member State votes from states representing 65 per cent of the population. Carrubba found also that states with weak domestic support for the EU tended to receive larger fiscal transfers, but in Rodden's more fully specified model this variable became statistically insignificant. I am grateful to Stephanie Bailer for providing me with the SSI scores used by the EU Decides project. Table 1 corrects a typographical error in Mattila (Citation2006: 42) where Portugal's 'fair' net transfer was mistakenly printed as 47 instead of 247. Nor do cash transfers buy support in the pre-voting stage: preferences of Ireland, Luxembourg, Greece, Portugal, Belgium and possibly also Denmark remain a long way from those of Germany (Zimmer et al. Citation2005). Financial transfers do not affect the relative power of the European Commission or European Parliament vis-à-vis the Council, so to bring these two supranational actors into the analysis, while preserving the adjusted power relations between each Member State, I rescaled the figures in Table 2 to maintain the ratio between their power and the Council's. I am grateful to Robert Thomson for kindly providing me with Mika Widgren's calculations of the Commission:Council and EP:Council power ratios under each decision-making procedure. To illustrate my approach, and for replication purposes, the rescaled SSInet scores for QMV-codecision are: Austria 0.011325, Belgium 0.013542, Denmark 0.007378, Finland 0.00747, France 0.036599, Germany 0.284715, Greece 0.003259, Ireland 0.004088, Italy 0.034827, Luxembourg 0.004463, Netherlands 0.020108, Portugal 0.005428, Spain 0.0024, Sweden 0.012761, UK 0.042976, Commission 0.254329, EP 0.254329. Negotiations over the 2011 EU budget did collapse in November, but this was due to a dispute over giving the European Parliament extra powers, not because of Member State disagreements over their respective contributions (http://euobserver.com/19/31274/?rk=1).
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-08-09
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 12
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot