Voting in the shadow of Russian aggression. Evidence from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe 2012-2016

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is not just the oldest but also the most institutionalised and powerful international parliamentary assembly. As transnational parliamentary body with the Russian Federation and Ukraine among its members, it showcases a laboratory for transnational parliamentary voting behaviour in the context of international geopolitical conflicts. We theorise how geopolitical aggression between member states change the voting pattern in the assembly. Whereas we generally assume a partisan cleavage as the main sorting mechanism, we theorise that this dimension will diminish under geopolitical threat. To test our claims, we explore voting patterns in the PACE around the Russian annexation of Crimea 2014. Using all contested votes from 2012 to 2016, we find that voting positions are structured around national interests in times of geopolitical tensions whereas a left-right cleavage emerges once the aggressor (i.e. Russia) was absent from the PACE.