A vote in favour of transparency?

Report on votingin the Council.

For three years, VoteWatch has been compiling and analysing data on the voting record of individual MEPs, and of the political groups in the European Parliament and their national delegations. VoteWatch, a private research group that focuses on decision-making in the European Union, this week published its first report on the voting behaviour of member states in the EU’s Council of Ministers, covering votes since July 2009, when the current Parliament began its work. Since then, the Council has adopted 343 pieces of legislation through a vote.

Including the Council in its monitoring is a logical step for VoteWatch: on most legislative acts, the Parliament and the Council are co-legislators. But the Council’s work is far more opaque than that of the Parliament. Its records are often late and incomplete, the form in which they are kept differs from policy area to policy area, and votes do not always follow formal procedures.

Manual work

VoteWatch, which is financed through grants from the Open Society Foundations and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, faces another hurdle in reporting on decision-making in the Council. Unlike the Parliament, the Council does not publish its data in machine-readable form. This means that VoteWatch researchers have to extract it manually from minutes of meetings, voting fiches, summaries of legislative acts and PreLex, a database on inter-institutional procedures managed by the European Commission.

Sara Hagemann, a vice-chair of VoteWatch and lecturer in EU politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, says that the differences between Council formations are considerable – even after the EU’s Treaty of Lisbon, which took effect in December 2009, streamlined decision-making, for example through the widespread use of weighted voting (known as qualified majority voting, or QMV).

“Formal voting is a requirement under QMV,” she says, “but in some Council settings it is used much more literally than in others. In some [policy] sectors there is an acceptance from member states that the chair knows when there is a majority.”

Signalling intent

It is evident from VoteWatch’s analysis that voting serves two distinct purposes. The first, most obvious purpose is to adopt legislation. The second is to engage in what academics call ‘signalling’ – taking a position, primarily for governments’ home audiences. An alternative to signalling through voting is provided by statements that member states enter in the record. These statements allow them to raise concerns and reservations about Council decisions while voting with the majority.

Fact File

Ins and outs

Over the past three years, the UK voted against the majority most frequently, in 29% of all votes that were not unanimous. Next were Germany and Austria (16%), Denmark (13%) and the Netherlands (11%). France and Lithuania always voted with the majority.

The UK and Germany, in addition to topping the list of votes against the majority, were also (together with Austria) the member states that voted against each other most frequently. The countries with the fewest ‘No’ votes and statements were Lithuania, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Luxembourg, Romania and Slovakia.

Two issues stood out as the most contentious: agriculture, and environment and public health. In agriculture, the UK disagreed with the majority most often, while in environment and public health that role was taken by Denmark. However, dissenting votes are rare even in the most contentious areas: out of 36 votes on matters relating to the environment and public health, Denmark voted ‘No’ just three times and abstained four times. In the 25 votes on agriculture, the UK voted ‘No’ once and abstained four times.

The gaps

The Council’s voting procedures and communication policy mean that the data VoteWatch compiles and analyses are incomplete. The Council releases data only on final votes by ministers on adopted legislative proposals. Rejections are not recorded as votes, and votes in preparatory bodies – such as the Committee of Permanent Representatives, or the various Council working groups – are not made public. Such bodies also frequently hold ‘shadow’ votes to gauge support for changes to legislative proposals, which are also not made public.

But perhaps the biggest gap in knowledge concerns decisions taken through comitology, a procedure that allows the European Commission to adopt implementing acts in Commission-chaired committees of member states’ representatives. The procedure was adapted after the Lisbon treaty took effect in December 2009, with new rules coming into force in March 2011. The system is still “the biggest hole in the transparency and legitimacy of the [EU’s] decision-making process”, according to Ignasi Guardans (pictured), a VoteWatch board member and a Spanish Liberal MEP in 2004-09.

Opening up

Despite the many gaps in the member states’ voting records, the Council is becoming more transparent, which is one of the reasons why VoteWatch has decided to monitor voting by member states as well as by MEPs.

Sara Hagemann, one of the authors of the report on Council voting, says that the report relies exclusively on publicly-available data. “There is a lot of information available from the Council. Compared with national systems, it is quite open,” she says. Before the Lisbon treaty, a lot depended on the holder of the Council’s rotating presidency, she adds. “Now things are a bit more centralised by the secretariat-general of the Council and a bit more consistent.”

Interestingly, the United Kingdom is not just the country with the highest share of ‘No’ votes and statements; it is also the only one of the 27 member states whose ‘No’ votes or abstentions (in cases where abstentions count as a ‘No’) exceed the number of statements. All other member states preferred making formal statements rather than actually voting against proposed legislation.

Nonetheless, the report shows that voting in the Council is a highly consensual affair. While 90% of the votes took place under QMV rules, a full 65% of QMV votes actually resulted in unanimity. “It is not an adversarial culture that we are in, it is very much a consensus culture,” Jonas Bering Liisberg, the deputy permanent representative of Denmark to the EU, said on Monday (9 July) at the launch of VoteWatch’s report on voting in the Council.