Designing the Voting System

DESIGNING THE VOTING SYSTEM FOR THE COUNCIL OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

Dennis Leech

No 587

WARWICK ECONOMIC RESEARCH PAPERS

DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

DESIGNING THE VOTING SYSTEM FOR THE COUNCIL OF THE EUROPEAN UNION Dennis Leech,

Department of Economics and CSGR, University of Warwick and Voting Power and Procedures programme, CPNSS, London School of Economics
Revised August 2001 (To be published in Public Choice.)

Dr D Leech Department of Economics University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7AL UK Phone: [phone] (direct) ([phone] (messages) 07712353201 (mobile) Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail] http://www.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/Economics/leech/

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Moshé Machover, Dan Felsenthal and an anonymous referee for advice and comments on this work, which have led to considerable improvements. Any remaining errors remain my responsibility. An earlier version was circulated as a working paper under the title: “Fair Reweighting of the Votes in the EU Council of Ministers and the Choice of Majority Requirement for Qualified Majority Voting During Successive Enlargements”. A preliminary version was presented to a seminar in the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at Warwick University;I would like to thank all participants for their comments.

Title: Designing the Voting System for the Council of the European Union Author: Dennis Leech Affiliation: Department of Economics and CSGR University of Warwick and Voting Power and Procedures Programme, CPNSS, London School of Economics.

Abstract: This paper examines the system of Qualified Majority Voting, used by the Council of the European Union, from the perspective of enlargement of the Union. It uses an approach based on power indices due to Penrose, Banzhaf and Coleman to make two analyses: (1) the question of the voting power of member countries from the point of view of fairness, and (2) the question of how

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Widgren (1994), “Voting Power in the EU and the Consequences of Two Different Enlargements”, European Economic Review, 38, 1153-70. 28 Figure 1:Flowchart of an Iterative Algorithm to Determine Weights for Given Target Powers Input Data: Targets ti Initial Weights wi i=1,n Calculate Power Indices: β? = β ? (w1 , w2 , ... , wn ) Test Convergence: Yes Is |β i - ti|