What Is a Fair Distribution of Power

Voting in the EU-Council – a brief sketch At least since the EU-summit in Nice in December 2000 there has been an intensive discussion about the voting procedure in the EU-Council. The Treaty of Nice contains a very complicated procedure which consists of three voting criteria. A proposal is accepted by the Council if: 1) the (simple) majority of states support the proposal 2) the proposal receives a " qualified majority " of votes. Each state has a certain voting weight (from 3 votes for Malta to 29 votes for the four biggest states). A qualified majority means: At least 232 votes out of 321 possible votes is required (for the 25-member Union). 3) The countries supporting the proposal should represent at least 62 % of the population of the EU. It turns out that in this complicated voting system the first and the third criterion play virtually NO role. In contrast to this the draft Constitution contains a voting procedure which consists merely of step 1) and 2) of the Nice procedure. This procedure is called the " double majority " rule. More precisely, the Constitution rule requires a majority of (more than 50%) of the countries and more than 60% of the population. Especially Spain and Poland objected to this procedure since they claim they do not get enough influence in the Council by that procedure. (In fact, they are right, as we will see.) As a compromise the Irish Presidency proposed to change the quota in the double majority rule to 55% of the states and 65% of the population. It is quite likely that this voting system will be accepted by the European Governments. We will see below that for Spain and Poland this system is even worse than the original draft Constitution. How to analyse " power " With 25 member states and complicated voting procedures it is not a trivial task to analyse the distribution of power in the Council. However, there is a mathematical concept called " Power Index " to quantify the influence of a member of a committee, as in the Council for example. The main idea is that power is the ability to change the decision of the committee by your vote. Suppose we know how all the other members vote (" Yes " or " No "). Your vote is decisive in this situation if your " Yes " …