Romania and Bulgaria in the European Union: A spatial analysis of Council voting

Abstract

In this paper I investigate the voting behaviour in the Council of the European Union between January 2006 and February 2009, i.e. immediately before and after the accesion of Romania and Bulgaria. In order to do so I have coded the results of the 339 codecision votes that took place during the period of reference and applied various multidimensional scaling methods that commonly used for the analysis of voting behaviour in legislatures: metric scaling, W-Nominate, Heckman-Snyder, and optimal classification. The results of the analysis tell us about the relative viability of the different methods in the EU context and provide us with a preliminary ideological map that represents the ideological positions of Romania and Bulgaria vis -a-vis the other member states of the EU.