Abstract
When studying the constitutional choice of European voting rules, most power index analyses concentrate on member states’ relative decisiveness for forming winning coalitions in the Council of Ministers. These studies have two shortcomings: (a) They ignore the distribution of relative power between the Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament, as defined by the multi-cameral European legislative procedures. (b) They disregard the absolute notion of power, which is dependent on the inclusion of member states in winning coalitions under various voting rules. In this article we present our approach on member states’ constitutional choice of European voting rules with regard to the two notions of power: actors’ relative decisiveness and their absolute inclusiveness in decision making. We present an index to measure inclusiveness and apply our concept to the European multi-cameral legislature. On the basis of our study, we present a reasoned account of motives behind member states’ recent institutional reforms of legislative procedures.
This chapter has been published in Homo Oeconomicus 17(1/2).
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Notes
- 1.
EU legislative sets of winning coalitions require consent among all relevant voting bodies and thus depend on the solution of the coalition problems at the subgame level. Winning coalitions of the bicameral standard procedure require the consent of the Commission and of the Council referring to unanimity, simple or qualified majority subgames of member states. The semi-tricameral cooperation procedure includes the EP in EU legislation in one out of two sets of feasible winning coalitions: the first set encompasses the Commission and all member states, the second set consists of coalitions comprising the Commission, more than 62 Council votes and at least half of the EP votes. The latter set of winning coalitions is also feasible under codecision procedure, but in this case the second set combines the unanimous member states with at least the absolute majority of EP votes. Since the Commission no longer has the right to withdraw its proposal when Council and Parliament conciliate their views in the second reading of the codecision procedure, the Commission can be excluded. Hence, under codecision procedure the EP holds the same position as the Commission under cooperation procedure. In this respect, both combinations of the two sets of winning coalitions install a semi-tricameral system: either the EP or the Commission can be excluded from EU legislation.
- 2.
For any coalition \( {\text{S}} \) of the actor set \( {\text{N}} \), \( {\text{v}}\left( {\text{S}} \right) = 1 \) if \( {\text{S}} \) is winning, and \( {\text{v}}\left( {\text{S}} \right) = 0 \) if \( {\text{S}} \) is losing, where \( {\text{v}} \) represents the characteristic function; \( {\text{v}} \) is monotonic if \( {\text{v}}\left( {\text{S}} \right) \ge {\text{v}}\left( {\text{T}} \right) \) for any \( {\text{S}} \supseteq {\text{T}} \).
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König, T., Bräuninger, T. (2013). Decisiveness and Inclusiveness: Two Aspects of the Intergovernmental Choice of European Voting Rules. In: Holler, M., Nurmi, H. (eds) Power, Voting, and Voting Power: 30 Years After. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35929-3_9
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