Democracy and the European Constitution: Majority Voting and Small Member States

Johannes Pollak

The Constitutionalism Web-Papers from University of Hamburg, Faculty for Economics and Social Sciences, Department of Social Sciences, Institute of Political Science

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to shed light on the relation between large and small member states with regard to the majority principle. Since Maastricht at the latest the institutional discussion centers around the question of how to devise a decision system which pays equal attention to the interests of small and large states in the European Union. This article challenges several underlying assumptions: that size is an important factor determining the political clout of a member state; the existence of ‘natural’ interest divergences and the competitive nature of the European politiy. Finally, it questions the intrinsic relation between majority voting and democracy.

Keywords: democracy; majority voting; European Convention; legitimacy; political science (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-06-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.wiso.uni-hamburg.de/fachbereich-sowi/p ... 04/conweb-4-2004.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erp:conweb:p0019

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in The Constitutionalism Web-Papers from University of Hamburg, Faculty for Economics and Social Sciences, Department of Social Sciences, Institute of Political Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jan WILKENS ().