Voting and Coalitions in the Council after the Enlargement

Abstract

Prior to the accession of ten new member states into the European Union in 2004 and of two additional members in 2007, some researchers were concerned that the enlarged Union, and particularly its major legislative organ the Council of Ministers, would be threatened by a gridlock. The rules for decision-making in the enlarged Union were decided in the Nice summit and subsequently codified in the Treaty of Nice. These rules increased the relative voting power of bigger member states at the expense of smaller member states. However, at the same time, the qualified majority voting (QMV) threshold required for the adoption of QMV proposals was raised, which prompted some researchers to forecast problems for future Council decision-making in an enlarged Union (Baldwin et al. 2001; Felsenthal and Machover 2001).