Winners and Losers under Various Dual-Majority Voting Rules for the EU’s Council of Ministers

This policy brief by CEPS studies the consequences of voting system reform through quantitative estimates of the decision-making efficiency and distributions of power for the various schemes proposed.

Introduction

It has long been known that eastern enlargement would have dramatic implications for EU decision-making; a structure designed for six would simply collapse under the weight of 25 or more members.

This is why EU leaders started the search for a viable voting-system reform at the 1996 Intergovernmental Conference (IGC). They failed to agree on a reform at the 1996 IGC for the Amsterdam Treaty, so the task – labelled the ‘Amsterdam leftovers’ – was taken up again at the IGC 2000. This IGC produced a range of workable reforms.2 All such reforms, however, broke the voting-power parity between France and Germany. The French – who held the Presidency at the time – decided that this was a deal-breaker. At the last minute, they brought out a complex, unstudied system and convinced the EU-15 leaders to put it into the Nice Treaty. As subsequent studies have shown, the Nice voting system fails to solve the enlarged EU’s decision-making problems.

EU leaders admitted their mistake by setting up the European Convention and assigning to it what may be called the ‘Nice leftovers’; this again included the task of finding a viable voting reform for the enlarged EU. The 2003 Convention did not openly discuss voting reforms; at short notice, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing put another unstudied voting scheme into the draft Constitutional Treaty. Subsequent studies showed that the ‘Giscard rule’ raised French voting power and lowered Spain’s, thus breaking the Nice Treaty’s near-parity between French and Spanish voting power. The Spanish decided that this was a deal-breaker and the IGC collapsed in December 2003, creating what may now be called the ‘Convention leftovers’.

This is why EU leaders are still searching for a viable voting system eight years on. They have given themselves until June 2004 to finish all the Convention leftovers.

This policy brief studies some of the many options facing EU leaders when choosing a viable voting system for the EU-25+. It provides quantitative estimates of the decision-making efficiency and power distributions of the various EU voting schemes being considered, along with intuition on how various aspects of the voting rules affect the EU member states.

Summary of our results

We have focused on the so-called ‘dual-majority’ schemes, where approval of a measure by the Council of Ministers would require a yes vote from nations that represent at least ‘X’% of the membership and ‘Y’% of the population; ‘X’ and ‘Y’ are called the ‘majority thresholds’. The main conclusions from our calculations are:

• Any of the mainstream dual-majority schemes – those with thresholds ranging from 50% to 60% – would maintain the enlarged Union’s ability to act. Several dual-schemes would quite substantially increase the Council of Minister’s decision-making efficiency and would thus shift power to the Commission and the Parliament.
• All the dual-majority systems would substantially alter the power distribution implicit in the Nice Treaty’s voting scheme. All of those we evaluated would reduce the power of Spain and Poland. Almost all of them would raise the power of members with less than 8 million citizens compared with the Nice system.
• The ‘even’ dual-majority schemes (where the two thresholds are the same) tend to rotate the power curve. That is, they cut the power of largest nations the most and raise the power of the smallest nations the most. Germany is an exception; the even-dual schemes would have only a small impact on its power. We also find that the power redistribution effects are similar for all the mainstream even-dual schemes (50%-50%, 55%-55% and 60%-60%).
• The ‘uneven-dual’ schemes can have larger and more varied effects on power than the even-dual schemes. Tig htening the membership threshold tends to shift power from big to small member states; tightening the population threshold tends to shift power the other way.
• The 60% membership and 50% population ratio is the only dual-majority system that maintains the near-great power status that Spain and Poland won in the Nice Treaty. Specifically, the 60%-50% dual-scheme ensures that the French-Spanish power gap remains at the level established in the Nice Treaty.
• The Nice Treaty’s flawed voting system could be repaired by changing two of its three majority thresholds. The result would be a respectable level of decision-making efficiency and almost no change to the Nice Treaty power distribution.
• The two big mistakes the EU has made with respect to voting reform were both because of last-minute ‘surprise’ schemes. A democratic control system that touches the lives of a half billion people should not be designed by last-minute improvisation. This time around, EU leaders should limit themselves to choosing among voting systems that have been thoroughly studied and discussed, if they want to avoid a third mistake on this issue.

Organisation of this policy brief

We start by introducing the two quantitative measures used in this essay – the passage probability and our measure of power, the Normalised Banzhaf Index (NBI). The next section provides intuition on how changes in the dual-majority rules affect our two measures. After this, we turn to the meat of our essay; section 4 reviews our results on the impact of various dual-majority systems on decision-making efficiency in the EU-25, EU-27 and the EU-27 plus Turkey; section 5 presents the power implications of the same. Given the pivotal role of Spain and Poland in the IGC discussions, section 6 spotlights the implications of the various dual-schemes for the gap between French and Spanish power. (Spain and Poland have almost identical power shares under all the dual-rules; France, Italy and the UK’s power shares also move in tandem.) Since it may not be possible to find a dual-majority rule that garners support from all nations, section 7 describes two ‘emergency repairs’ of the Nice Treaty’s triple-majority system, which we suggested in 2001. These would maintain EU-27 decisionmaking efficiency without altering the Nice Treaty’s power distribution. Section 8 presents our concluding remarks.

The introduction is taken directly from the CEPS policy brief. To read the analysis in full,

visit the CEPS website. To read other CEPS analyses,click here.