Decision-Making and Networks in the Council of the European Union after Brexit

We assess the likely impact of the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union on legislative decision-making and network relations in the Council of the European Union. The Council of the EU, in which member states are represented, is the most powerful institution in the EU, and is the part of the EU in which the UK’s departure is likely to have the clearest observable implications. We draw on the spatial model of legislative politics and insights from network analysis to develop theoretical propositions regarding the impact of the UK’s exit on decision-making in the Council. We apply these propositions to two of the most prominent datasets on recent decision-making in the EU: the Decision-making in the EU (DEU) dataset and the Gothenburg dataset on cooperative network relations in the Council’s working groups. The spatial model of legislative politics specifies how the location of the pivotal position in a policy space affects the decision outcome on any controversial issue. The model highlights the difference between decisions taken by unanimity and the increasingly prevalent supermajority rule of Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) with respect to the conditions under which the exit of an actor would make a difference to the location of the pivotal position. Under unanimity, the exit of an actor only affects the location of the pivotal position if that actor happens to be the most conservative actor, i.e. if it is the actor located closest to the status quo policy. Under QMV, the exit of an actor could potentially affect the location of the pivotal position regardless of the location of that actor’s position. Under both rules, the clustering of actors’ policy positions into discrete groups of positions affects whether the removal of any actor affects the location of the pivotal position. The DEU dataset contains detailed information on the policy preferences of each member state on 331 controversial issues. We examine these data to identify issues on which the removal of the UK changes the location of the pivotal position. One of the main insights of network analysis is that networks are held together by both direct and indirect relations between actors. The exit of any one of the actors from a network has obvious implications for the direct relations between that actor and the others with which it is connected. Exits also have less obvious implications for the indirect relations between the remaining actors. For instance, if an actor forms a bridge between otherwise unconnected or weakly connected pairs of other actors, then its removal could have far reaching consequences for the cohesion of the network, far beyond the impact of its direct relations. The Gothenburg dataset has systematically surveyed member state representatives in each of the main working groups of the Council to identify the main cooperation partners of each of the states. Using this dataset, we assess the impact of the UK’s exit on the relations between the remaining member states and on the cohesion of the network as a whole.