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Decision rules, membership and political centralization in the European Union

“…Armed with these results Boudreaux and Lipford (1998) Fig. 1 The optimal decision rule 1 Empirical support for this was previously provided by Crain and Tollison (1977) who found that US states with larger legislatures (more representatives) employed less inclusive voting rules for constitutional amendments.…”

“…The optimal rule however becomes less inclusive since the number of people required for an agreement does not increase in proportion to the increase in the size of the group: more people may be necessary to agree at the optimum but they represent a smaller proportion of the total group. 1 The effect of preference heterogeneity on the optimal rule is more ambiguous (Kafoglis and Cebula 1981;Boudreaux and Lipford 1998). It shifts both the C and D curves upwards since, for any given voting rule, more heterogeneity increases the external costs expected from collective decisions and makes agreement harder to achieve.…”

“…If the opposite happens then the optimal rule should becomes less inclusive. Whether or not preference heterogeneity leads to more inclusive rules, it is sure to reduce the rationality of collective action given any particular voting rule (Buchanan and Tullock 1962;Kafoglis and Cebula 1981;Boudreaux and Lipford 1998). Assuming opportunity costs 0A from foregoing collective action then greater preference heterogeneity shifts up the social interdependence costs relative to 0A, making collective action less attractive.…”

“…Based on this seminal contribution, Boudreaux and Lipford (1998) analyze the impact on EU voting rules of the enlargement of the Union as well as different degrees of preference heterogeneity across EU policy areas. After reviewing their contribution (Sect.…”

“…Apart from extending Boudreaux and Lipford's (1998) application of the Buchanan and Tullock model to the EU, this article aims to contribute towards the meeting of two strands of work applying economic instruments to the analysis of political institutions namely, public choice literature and the latter political economics literature. It has been argued that the latter fails to acknowledge, let alone incorporate, the main insights from the public choice perspective (Blankart and Koester 2006;Tollison 2007).…”