A Utilitarian Assessment of Alternative Decision Rules in the Council of Ministers
| Author | Claus Beisbart,Stephan Hartmann,Luc Bovens |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116505057814 |
| Published date | 01 December 2005 |
| Date | 01 December 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Union Politics
A Utilitarian Assessment of
DOI: 10.1177/1465116505057814
Volume 6 (4): 395–418
Alternative Decision Rules in
Copyright© 2005
SAGE Publications
the Council of Ministers
London, Thousand Oaks CA,
New Delhi
Claus Beisbart
University of Konstanz, Germany
Luc Bovens
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Stephan Hartmann
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
A B S T R A C T
We develop a utilitarian framework to assess different
decision rules for the European Council of Ministers. The
proposals to be decided on are conceptualized as utility
vectors and a probability distribution is assumed over the
utilities. We first show what decision rules yield the highest
expected utilities for different means of the probability distri-
bution. For proposals with high mean utility, simple bench-
mark rules (such as majority voting with proportional
weights) tend to outperform rules that have been proposed
in the political arena. For proposals with low mean utility, it
is the other way round. We then compare the expected
utilities for smaller and larger countries and look for Pareto-
dominance relations. Finally, we provide an extension of the
model, discuss its restrictions, and compare our approach
with assessments of decision rules that are based on the
K E Y W O R D S
Penrose measure of voting power.
Council of Ministers
European Constitution
probabilistic modelling
utilitarianism
voting theory
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European Union Politics 6(4)
Introduction
A central problem in negotiating the EU Constitution was how to define quali-
fied majority voting in the Council of Ministers (Council or CM for short). In
more general terms, such a problem arises for any federation in which the
member countries have to decide on collective actions. A decision rule is
needed that determines for which combinations of the countries’ votes (i.e.
for which voting profiles) a proposal is accepted. The problem is: which
decision rule should be chosen? How should qualified majority voting be
defined for the CM?
The problem of finding a decision rule not only was the subject of politi-
cal negotiations in the EU, but also has been attracting much academic
interest. Many authors start by requiring a fair distribution of powers. The
power or influence of political agents (such as persons or countries) is then
expressed in terms of some quantitative measure. The most frequently used
measures are the Penrose measure (Penrose, 1952) and its normalization in the
Banzhaf index (Banzhaf, 1965). The Penrose measure equals the probability of
making a difference to whether a proposal is or is not accepted (see Felsen-
thal and Machover, 1998, for a general discussion and Felsenthal and
Machover, 2001, for an application to the CM). An alternative measurement
of voting power is provided by the Shapley–Shubik index, which is based on
cooperative game theory (Shapley and Shubik, 1954; for an application to the
CM see, e.g., Widgrén, 1994). Both the Penrose measure and the
Shapley–Shubik index are a priori measures because they do not take into
account any empirical information about the political agents’ preferences.
Despite their extensive usage, power measures have come under attack
(e.g. Garrett and Tsebelis, 1999, and Albert, 2003; for a response to Albert, see
Felsenthal et al., 2003). One of the objections is that power measures do not
take into account the actual preferences of the political agents, whereas, on a
realistic view, the influence of a country in the CM depends on how its pref-
erences are related to the other countries’ preferences. For this reason, alterna-
tive approaches that build on a posteriori information on preferences have
been developed. One prominent example is the strategic power index intro-
duced by Steunenberg et al. (1999), which builds upon non-cooperative game
theory. A unifying perspective on power measures and strategic power has
recently been developed by Napel and Widgrén (2004).
In this article we propose to pursue a completely different line and assess
alternative decision rules in the Council within a strictly utilitarian frame-
work. We use this approach because the implementation of a decision rule is
likely to have positive or negative effects on the people in the various EU
countries. The reason is that the decision rule governs which proposals will
Beisbart, Bovens and Hartmann
A Utilitarian Assessment of Alternative Decision Rules
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be accepted, where the proposals have positive and negative effects on the
people themselves. For example, if a proposal imposes tariffs on the import
of olives from Tunisia, then people in the Mediterranean EU countries will
typically benefit – they can sell their olives at a higher price – whereas people
from non-Mediterranean EU countries will on average be worse off than
before – they will be paying a higher price for their olives. If we quantify
these effects in terms of utilities and put them together, we get some net effect
for Europe as a whole. Now people will be better off if the decision rule will
block proposals with a negative net effect and let pass proposals with a
positive net effect. Accordingly, the best decision rule will filter the propos-
als in such a way as to maximize the net utility. Since one cannot foresee the
proposals that might be made, we will set up a probabilistic model for propos-
als and evaluate what voting rule yields the highest expected utility. This rule,
we suggest, should be chosen.
Though their investigation takes a different direction, Barberà and
Jackson (2004) share our interest in assessing decision rules for a federal
assembly on the basis of expected utility. There is also some similarity in moti-
vation with strategic power indices (Steunenberg et al., 1999), although the
details differ greatly.
The Council of Ministers is part of a larger framework of closely inter-
acting institutions. To make things simpler we will abstract from the other
institutions in the following way. First, the work of the Commission (which
makes the proposals) will be used only to constrain the probability distri-
bution for the proposals. The idea is that the Commission will function as
a pre-selector of proposals; thus some kinds of proposals will only rarely be
brought forward because there is no Commission to draft them. Secondly,
we will neglect the work of the European Parliament – whose acceptance is
needed for some considerable proportion of the proposals. To be able to do
so, we can restrict ourselves to proposals that do not need acceptance by the
Parliament. Alternatively, the work of the Parliament might be thought of
as an additional pre-selection of proposals that can be absorbed into the
probability distribution of our model, too. Further, in assessing decision
rules for the CM, it is generally reasonable to concentrate on the CM as a
first step. This kind of approach is, after all, taken by many authors (see
Kirsch et al., 2004).
Our model is still rudimentary at this stage. But full empirical adequacy
is not our aim in this paper. Rather, we seek to apply the utilitarian criterion
on the basis of a few reasonable assumptions. We do not claim that our
account is superior to the well-established power measures. Instead, our
analysis allows for a different perspective on decision-making in the EU. It
focuses on benefits and costs and takes seriously the possibility that the
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European Union Politics 6(4)
benefits for a country that votes for a proposal are different from the costs for
a country that votes against the proposal.
The plan of our paper is as follows. In the next section we introduce a
number of decision rules. We then lay out our model. After presenting our
results, we discuss what political lessons can be learned from our results,
expound a set of concerns, and examine the relation between our approach
and one power measure approach. Mathematical details are given in the
Appendix.1 We will restrict ourselves to the 25-member EU.
Alternative decision rules
We will compare seven decision rules. Rules SMP through P62 are conceptu-
ally simple and act as interesting benchmarks.
(SMP)
Simple majority with proportional weights. A proposal is accepted
if and only if the population of the member countries that support
the proposal is at least 50% of the total population of the European
Union.
(SME)
Simple majority with equal weights. A proposal is accepted if and
only if at least 50% of the member countries support the proposal.
(D)
The double-majority model. This model combines the conditions of
SMP and SME. A proposal is accepted if and only if the population
of the member countries that support the proposal is at least 50% of
the total population of the European Union and at least 50% of the
member countries support the proposal. The double-majority model
was proposed by the European Commission at the Intergovernmen-
tal Conference in 2000.
(P62)
The Penrose-62 Rule. A proposal is accepted if the voting weights
of the countries in favour of the proposal add up to at least 62% of
the total voting weights, where the voting weight of each country is
proportional to the square root of its population. The motivation for
this is as follows. Let us suppose that each country elects a represen-
tative for the Council from two candidates on the basis of a simple
majority vote. Penrose (1946) showed that the voting power of each
citizen in the election of the representative is inversely proportional
to the square root of the population in his/her country. Therefore, if
we set the voting power...
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