Voting Power in the EU Council of Ministers and Fair Decision Making in Distributive Politics

Michel Le Breton, Maria Montero and Vera Zaporozhets ()

No 716, IDEI Working Papers from Institut d'Économie Industrielle (IDEI), Toulouse

Abstract: We analyze and evaluate the different decision rules describing the Council of Ministers of the EU starting from 1958 up to now. Most of the existing studies use the Banzhaf index (for binary voting) or the Shapley-Shubik index (for distributive politics). We argue in favor of the nucleolus as a power measure in distributive situations and an alternative to the Shapley-Shubik index. We then calculate the nucleolus and compare the results of our calculations with the conventional measures. In the second part, we analyze the power of the European citizens as measured by the nucleolus under the egalitarian criterion proposed by Felsenthal and Machover (1998), and characterize the first best situation. Based on these results we propose a methodology for the de sign of the optimal (fair) decision rules. We perform the optimization exercise for the earlier stages of the EU within a restricted domain of voting rules, and conclude that Germany should receive more than the other three large countries under the optimal voting rule.

JEL-codes: C71 C72 C78 D63 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (43)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Voting power in the EU council of ministers and fair decision making in distributive politics (2012)
Working Paper: Voting Power in the EU Council of Ministers and Fair Decision Making in Distributive Politics (2012)
Working Paper: Voting Power in the EU Council of Ministers and Fair Decision Making in Distributive Politics (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ide:wpaper:25809

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