Abstract This article explores voting patterns in the Council of the European Union between May 2004 and the end of December 2006, studying the full set of voting records for this institution. It analyses government vote choices in the Council on the basis of ordered logistic regression analysis, explaining the propensity of European Union (EU) Member States to vote yes, abstain from voting or vote no. The article explains voting behaviour in the Council on the basis of selected independent variables – notably, governments' absolute and relative positions on the left–right policy dimension, support for European integration among domestic audiences, Member States' population size, and their positions as either net beneficiaries of or net payers into the EU budget. The empirical analysis reveals that voting behaviour is markedly different for the group of older EU Member States compared to its newer ones, with some of the explanatory variables even displaying opposite signs for these two groups in the statistical analyses.