A more balanced composition of the European Parliament with degressive proportionality

Blanca L Delgado-Márquez, Michael Kaeding and Antonio Palomares

European Union Politics, 2013, vol. 14, issue 3, 458-471

Abstract: Degressive proportionality constitutes the main conceptual criterion to determine the composition of the European Parliament (EP). In reality, however, this concept entails serious practical problems as exemplified by the current distribution of seats in the EP. This article takes up the call and presents a new method for a better balanced seat allocation in the EP after the 2014 elections. Comparing with recent methods in the field, our results reveal that the method proposed yields a more balanced and juster parliamentary seat distribution among all European member states by joining the strengths of the existing methods and avoiding their weaknesses. In light of upcoming rounds of enlargement and possible amendments to the EP's internal rules of procedure and existing EU Treaties, we contend that our results are not only of interest to the academic world.

Keywords: European Parliament; composition; degressive proportionality; allotment methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1465116513485470 (text/html)

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:sae:eeupol:v:14:y:2013:i:3:p:458-471

DOI: 10.1177/1465116513485470

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Union Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().