Party politics and the shaping of migration policy in the Council of Ministers

The Council of Ministers is still the European Union's decision-making center in migration policy. However, we know little about the determinants of member state's policy positions. This article tests three hypotheses: member state positions might be influenced by socioeconomic conditions, by public opinion, or by partisan preferences. We conduct a quantitative analysis of two legislative proposals at the intersection of migration and welfare policy (the returns directive, COD/2005/167 and the social security regulation, 2016/0397/COD) using member state positions as the dependent variable. The result is that different factors are important for positioning on the two proposals: member state positions on the returns directive are correlated with public opinion, while their positions on the social security regulation are correlated with party positions, especially the position of the economically rightmost coalition partner. Thus, our study takes issue with the argument that migration politics in the Council are disconnected from the domestic arena.