Abstract
In the European Union Council of Ministers recorded disagreements are rare. It is argued that this is due to the so called norm of consensus. This norm leads governments to support new legislation while preferring the existing policy to the new policy. In other words, in EU decision-making governments refrain opposing new legislation at the final voting stage, while voicing their opposition in the negotiations over the policy-proposal. In this paper, we evaluate this claim by combining positional data with voting data on 44 controversial directives. We measure the magnitude of the norm of consensus in the setting of a one-dimensional spatial model. The results show that there is a positive, but very weak, relationship between the spatial location of a government and its actual voting behaviour. All governments are substantively more supportive of new legislation than the spatial model predicts. However, the norm of consensus does not completely dictate voting. On sufficiently salient issues, the norm of consensus breaks Down.