Vienna, June 2000
EU
Reform: Comment on a Commission Opinion
The
Intergovernmental Conference of the European Union must come up with a set of
proposals for reforming EU institutions in advance of the Eastern enlargement –
notably including the issue of voting in the Council of Ministers. In the
Opinion issued by the European Commission on January 26, 2000, “Adapting The
Institutions To Make A Success Of Enlargement”, President Romano Prodi defined
double simple majority of member states and their populations as an easily
understandable option for the reform of the voting system. Prodi's proposal
helps to advance the discussion on the voting reform, but double majority is
itself flawed as a solution. Iain Paterson, economist at the Institute for
Advanced Studies, Vienna, has done extensive research on qualified majority
voting during the last three years and shows that the degree of reform
contained in any reweighting proposal, also including double majorities, and
the distribution of power between member states associated with it can be
measured and consequently used to provide advice on the effects of making
changes to this unique decision-making system.
Representing
more than half of the entire population of the EU, qualified majority voting is
encountering problems
Voting strengths of member
states in the European Council now have a long tradition of being determined in
the treaties by “weighted votes”, which deliberately underplay the “demographic
weight”, in terms of population, of the largest states and progressively
overweight smaller states. Weighted votes thus serve as a neat compromise
between two competing principles: the voting strength being equal for all
states at one extreme, and votes being determined exactly by population, at the
other. There has only been one major review of voting weights, when the EU (its
predecessor EEC) made its first enlargement from six to nine members. Since
then, new members have been allocated a weight by interpolation, to fit in line
with the weights of the existing members. A qualified majority needed for
taking a decision in the European Council requires that more than the
historically defined quota of 71% of total votes is reached by states in
favour. This particular quota has no special significance, except that it has
always ensured that a qualified majority vote (QMV) thus reached has the
support of more than half of the member states, which together represent more
than half of the entire population of the EU.
Despite its clever construction, two
problems of the voting system have been observed as the EU has grown to the
current size of 15 member states. They need to be addressed before the Eastern
Enlargement of the European Union, leading eventually to a total membership of
28 states, starts:
1.
The inherent
bias of new member states being smaller than average leads to a dilution of the
balance of relative voting power over the whole EU. Acknowledgement of this
deficit led to the Annex of the Treaty of Amsterdam, which calls for a reform
that benefits larger member states. In return, those larger member states will
most likely give up their privilege of nominating one more Commissioner than
other states.
2.
The second
deficit refers to the increasing difficulty of reaching a majority in the
European Council: as its size progressively increases, QMV in the Council
becomes increasingly unworkable, basically because more and more states have to
find common ground, persuading each other to adapt their initial positions in
order to reach an agreement.
Double majority voting generates
a volatile distribution of power
Other problems of the
current system, for example the fact that QMV decisions could theoretically be
taken by countries representing an ever-decreasing proportion of the union
population, have effectively been answered by the Prodi Opinion. By favouring a
double simple majority of both states and population, the Commission has
implicitly defined these two criteria as norms to be taken into account by any
reform, including reweighting. However, a proposal to implement double majority
voting as a replacement for weighted voting would have a drawback – not in its
arithmetical implementation, but in the fact that it would generate a
distribution of power which is volatile, alternating between being a moderate
reform in the sense sought after, and being no reform at all, depending on the
size of membership of the union.[1]
Worse still, when compared to using an extrapolation of the current system, the
only sure winner among the larger states would be Germany, and ironically, the
very smallest states including Luxembourg, Cyprus, Malta, and Estonia.
Regardless of these latter unintended consequences, double majority voting
would, however, have the advantage of definitely increasing the workability of
QMV. The idea of double majority voting is also that the norms of democratic
legitimacy are plain for all to see: this is indeed the case, but it is
obtained at the expense of obscuring the real power which states acquire
through their voting rights.
Indicating the actual voting
power by reweighting
Almost the exact opposite
can be said of reweighting systems. In this case the relative voting strength
is a very good indicator of the actual voting power. The norms of democratic
legitimacy regarding the double majorities of states and population have
however to be carefully ”engineered” into the actual system adopted. But this is certainly
feasible, indeed the analytic tools for this purpose have been invented. Models of reweighting, which differ
chiefly in degree of reform, can be considered. Any really effective reform of
vote weighting will nevertheless additionally have to adopt explicitly one of
the norms proposed by President Prodi – namely the requirement for a simple
majority of member states in any QMV – to guarantee this aspect of legitimacy.
Luckily, such requirement is as easy to write into the draft of any future
treaty as it is to check in practice.
The relationship between
current voting weights and the demographic size of states can be approximated
on a logarithmic scale by a proportionality factor of 0.42.[2]
Knowing this allows a comparison with possible vote weighting reforms. Taking a moderate reform
involving a factor of, for example, 0.55, illustrates that both democratic
norms can be observed while the quota for the QMV threshold can be reduced
somewhat, to 67% of total votes. Latter reduction is important, if the level of
workability is to be kept at the current level without deterioration as the EU
gets bigger. A real improvement in workability, on the other hand, can be
achieved with a major reform, equivalent to a factor of, say, 0.67, because the
quota may be reduced to 62% while still complying with the legitimacy norms and
without any significant change in the distribution of power as compared to keeping
the quota fixed at its present level.
Intriguingly, even more
substantial gains to Council workability can be gained with the moderate
weighting reform by reducing the threshold even further, to a quota of 60%. As in other cases the
norm requiring a simple majority of states is invoked explicitly. Perhaps unexpectedly, it can be shown also
that for any future configuration of the EU from 15 up to 28 members, there is
an a-priori certainty, which is as high as 99.98%, of compliance with the
legitimacy concern that one half of EU citizens are indirectly represented by
their governments under any particular decision taken by QMV! In the extremely
unlikely chance that only 40% of the EU’s population were to be represented by
the qualified majority in a vote, it is worth bearing in mind that nearly all
the non-large states would of necessity be in such a coalition: perhaps
enduring the remote possibility of this albeit unlikely scenario would be a
concession worth making at the Intergovernmental Conference, where ultimately,
all states, large and small, must reach an agreement on reform.[3]
For further information
please contact:
Iain Paterson:
Phone: ++43-(0)1-599 91-152, E-Mail: paterson@ihs.ac.at