Money Makes the EU Go Round : The Objective Foundations of Conflict in the Council of Ministers

Many examinations of the dimensions of conflict in the EU Council of Ministers focus on the ideological roots of contestation in the European Union. In this article, we examine for the voting records of the Council in general and five of its subunits (Agriculture, Fisheries, Financial Affairs, Environment, Economic Affairs) the extent to which structural indicators explain the conflict between the member states. This is in contrast to the extant studies on the topic which, by and large, use the aggregated voting records to identify general dimensions of conflict and to regress left-right positions of the governments or other ideological variables on them. Drawing on previous work such as Zimmer et al. (see also 2005) and Mattila (2009), we show that redistributive interests shape the interactions considerably in the aggregate and also in some of the policy domains that we examine in more detail. The article concludes with a discussion what our disaggregated analysis implies for general studies of conflict in the EU