Invariably Suboptimal: An Attempt to Improve the Voting Rules of the Treaties of Nice and Lisbon

Abstract

In this article the voting rules in the Council of the European Union are investigated. It is known that both the current system, according to the Treaty of Nice, and the voting system proposed in the Lisbon Treaty strongly deviate from Penrose's square root law, which under certain assumptions can be shown to be the ideal power distribution. Since it seems easier to make corrections to the current systems than to agree upon completely different new voting rules, one may hope that adjustments of the quota in the Lisbon Treaty might give rise to a system that is close to the square root law. In this article, this question is investigated. The computations it contains show that a mere change of quota in the treaties of Nice and Lisbon cannot bring the system substantially closer to the ideal distribution of power as given by the square root law.

Voting power and decision making in environmental committees: The case of French water agencies

“…The solution concept is the stationary subgame perfect equilibrium (SSPE). 19 Banks and Duggan [3] have shown that an SSPE always exists in this type of bargaining model. In addition, Eraslan [13] has shown that all SSPE lead to the same expected equilibrium payo¤s.…”

“…One may notice that the example for the Adour-Garonne RBC corresponds to the last row in the table, i.e., the three indices suggest equal distribution of power for the three water user groups. 19 Stationarity requires that players follow the same strategy at every round t regardless of past o¤ers and responses to past o¤ers. 20 Moreover, Montero [29] has analyzed the above bargaining game in the case where i = < 1 for all i = 1; :::; n.…”

“…The traditional power measures, such as the Shapley-Shubik index [36] and the Banzhaf index [34,4], have been widely discussed and applied to analyze many voting institutions, such as the EU Council of Ministers [22,32,33,15,8], the United States Legislative system [37,14], and the Canadian Constitutional Amendment Scheme [37]. The Banzhaf index has been also used to study the design of voting bodies in the EU, US, or IMF [5,15,16,19,24,28]. To the best of my knowledge, to date no one has used the concepts of voting power to examine these issues in the context of environmental committees in general, and the French RBCs in particular.…”

On the Democratic Weights of Nations

“…The corresponding practical suggestion is also known as the Penrose square root rule. Despite criticism that it treats voting decisions too much like coin tosses, the rule has provided a benchmark for numerous applied studies which consider the distribution of voting power in the EU, US, or IMF (including Felsenthal andMachover 2001, 2004;Grofman and Feld 2005;Fidrmuc et al 2009;Leech and Leech 2009;Miller 2009Miller , 2012Kirsch and Langner 2011). And though practitioners may not care about Penrose's reasoning itself -for instance, when the EU heads of state and government bargained on new, post-2017 voting rules for the Council -they have invoked Penrose's suggestion when it fitted their interests.…”

Behavioral Economics and the Public Sector

“…the quota can be at most two thirds), or all double majority voting systems. 56 See for example Barthélémy and Martin (2011), Kirsch and Langner (2011), Leech (2002), Turnovec (2011), orŻyczkowski andSłomczyński (2013). Note that the main scientific contributions of these works are not corrupted by using this suboptimal error term.…”