It is often argued that EU voting rules in the Council of Ministers give too much weight to small countries by giving them more votes in proportion to their population than those given to large countries. Discussion Paper No. 1402 examines this often-heard argument by assessing the current distribution of power in the Council. Annick Laruelle and Research Affiliate Mika Widgrén model EU decision-making as a simple super-additive compound game in which the actual distribution of power is measured using the Banzhaf index. Possible definitions of the EU – as a unitary state, an association of states, or combinations of these extremes – are given and their implications in terms of fairness are studied. The fair allocation of power is then defined on the basis of the principle ‘equal treatment among equals’. Thus, in an association of states, each state should be treated equally, and within a state, each citizen should be treated equally. The authors find that the current distribution of power in the EU does not meet the specified fairness criteria under any of the potential institutional frameworks. They propose a method to derive a distribution of votes in the Council which gives a fair allocation of power to member states conditional on a given prior definition of the EU.

The analysis of this paper gives three policy recommendations. First, before considering a redistribution of votes among states, the EU members should agree on the definition of the EU. Indeed, a fair distribution of power depends crucially on the weight that the EU gives to the ‘one man one vote’ principle. Second, given that power indices are more appropriate measures of voter influence than voting weights, small voters, such as the small countries of the EU, should have more votes in proportion to their size than large voters, such as the large countries of the EU. Third, the calculations of this paper suggest that there are no serious fairness arguments to concentrate the current allocation of votes towards the largest countries in the EU Council of Ministers.

Is the Allocation of Voting Power Among the EU States Fair?
Annick Laruelle and Mika Widgrén