The Resilience of Consensus in the EU Legislation-Making Process

The paper seeks to understand the continuity of the high level of consensus within the Council of the EU, the European Parliament and between both institutions in spite of the crisis. Voting records reveal an ongoing high level of support for EU legislation, which can be regarded as a matter of surprise in a period of multiple crises and greater politicisation. To assess this continuity, we first propose to explore voting records assessing the variations between policy fields and actors. To do so, we rely on the dataset of the Observatory of the European Institutions (OEI) which provides us with new data on dissent and conflict in the course of the legislative process. Furthermore, on the basis of the OEI dataset and of interviews conducted with members of the European Parliament and with Council members before the crisis and in 2016-2018, we test four hypotheses: norm continuity; strategic cooperation from pro-EU actors; institutional patriotism; the lack of transparency of the voting records.