Council Decision Rules and European Union Constitutional Design
In the recent past, the choice of adequate voting weights and decision rules for the Council of the European Union (EU) has been a highly contested issue in EU intergovernmental negotiations. In general terms, the selection of a threshold for qualified majority votes (QMV) in the Council constitutes a trade-off in terms of decreased sovereignty for individual governments versus an increased collective ‘capacity to act’. This paper compares the effects of the proposal tabled by the Convention on the Future of Europe with the Nice Treaty provisions and the Lisbon Treaty, in terms of both the efficiency of decision-making and the distribution of relative voting power within the EU of twenty-seven member states. In addition, the paper shows how with the current size of EU membership, the EU risks being unable to reach intergovernmental agreement. Accordingly, a challenging issue for the future of the EU is to move towards reasonable provisions that allow its own constitution – if ever adopted – to get amended.
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Volume (Year): 2 (2008)
Issue (Month): 1 (March)
Pages: 076-096
| Handle: | RePEc:fau:aucocz:au2008_076 |
| Contact details of provider: | Postal: Phone: +420 2 222112330 Fax: +420 2 22112304 Web page: http://ies.fsv.cuni.cz/Email: More information through EDIRC
|
| Order Information: | Web: http://auco.cuni.cz/ Email: |
References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
- Annick Laruelle & Mika Widgrén, 1998.
"Is the allocation of voting power among EU states fair?,"
Public Choice,
Springer, vol. 94(3), pages 317-339, March.
- Laruelle, Annick & Widgren, Mika, 1998. " Is the Allocation of Voting Power among EU States Fair?," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 94(3-4), pages 317-39, March.
- Laruelle, Annick & Widgren, Mika, 1996. "Is the allocation of voting power among EU states fair?," Discussion Papers (IRES - Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales) 1996022, Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES).
- Leech, Dennis, 2002. " Designing the Voting System for the Council of the European Union," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 113(3-4), pages 437-64, December.
- Axel Moberg, 2002. "The Nice Treaty and Voting Rules in the Council," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(2), pages 259-282, 06.
- D. Kilgour & Terrence Levesque, 1984. "The Canadian constitutional amending formula: Bargaining in the past and the future," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 44(3), pages 457-480, January.
- Moshé Machover & Dan S. Felsenthal, 2001. "The Treaty of Nice and qualified majority voting," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer, vol. 18(3), pages 431-464.
- Hosli, Madeleine O., 1993. "Admission of European Free Trade Association states to the European Community: effects on voting power in the European Community Council of Ministers," International Organization, Cambridge University Press, vol. 47(04), pages 629-643, September.
- Baldwin, Richard & Berglöf, Erik & Giavazzi, Francesco & Widgrén, Mika, 2000. "EU Reforms for Tomorrow’s Europe," CEPR Discussion Papers 2623, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fau:aucocz:au2008_076. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Lenka Stastna)
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.