Does Implicit Voting Matter? Coalitional Bargaining in EU the Legislative Process

Abstract

This paper theorises how decision-makers in the EU legislative process reach consensual decisions and in which policy direction through a mechanism of “implicit voting”. I introduce spatial model coalitional bargaining using a utility function that incorporates decision-maker considerations of the policy gains they expect to obtain for an outcome and the policy concessions they will need to give to other decision-makers so as to have this outcome accepted. The model predicts the formation of a compact coalition where the differences among the distances between each decision-maker position and the coalitional position are less pronounced than in competing alternative coalitions. This coalition will be able to implement this policy position as the outcome of the legislative process. The empirical evaluation of the model with DEU for 44 proposals and 111 issues of EU legislative process shows that the compact coalition offers a good prediction of how consensus in arrived at in the EU, suggesting that implicit voting explains well how EU decisional actors make consensual decisions and the direction this consensus takes