Suomen neuvottelupositiot Euroopan unionin neuvostossa vuosina 1995-2004

Authors

• Antti Pajala
• Mika Widgrèn

Abstract

The scholarly literature studying actor alignments in the EU Council usually takes into account all Member States. Here we instead focus exclusively on Finland. Applying a Spearman rank correla­tion test and data on actual negotiation positions of the Member States we test two hypotheses which are formulated in accordance to the results of earlier studies. First, following the often discovered north – south division in the Council we should expect the Finnish positions to corre­late best with other Nordic countries. Second, as Finland has been observed to vote extremely rarely against the Council proposals, the Finnish negotiation positions should correlate very well vis-à-vis the vote outcomes. The results show the Finnish positions correlating the most with Denmark and Sweden and to some extent also with Austria and Germany. Second, among the Member States the Finnish positions have the highest overall correlation with the negotiation outcomes. The results are statistically significant, however the correlation coefficients are rather low and in some cases modest indicating that there are no stable and consistent actor alignment patterns in the Council as the previous literature suggests.