Decisions made by consensus in the Council of the European Union emerge from the coalition-building behaviour of individual governments

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Series Details 11.06.13
Publication Date 11/06/2013
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Despite the use of qualified majority voting, a high percentage of decisions in the Council of the European Union are still made by consensus. Frank Häge outlines a model which can potentially explain this phenomenon. He argues that the high numbers of decisions made by consensus are in fact an unintended by-product of coalition building within the Council: states band together to form blocking coalitions, with eventual decisions reflecting a compromise between these coalitions (and therefore a consensus between all states). This explains why decisions made by consensus are still extremely common, despite the EU enlargements which have taken place since the mid-1990s.

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