Posted on 06/18/2007 2:47:24 AM PDT by Lukasz
What is a fair voting system for the European Union? It looks as though, thanks to Poland, European leaders will be forced to debate this difficult question at their summit this week.
Since the simplified draft treaty is substantively identical to the old and rejected constitution - minus some cosmetics - the voting system proposed is going to be the same one: passage of legislation requires a coalition of countries representing at least 55 per cent of the member states and 65 per cent of the population. The Poles have threatened a veto unless the second of those two numbers is based on the square root of the population size - to reduce Germany's influence. It sounds arbitrary, but the Poles have a point. Mathematics is on the side of Poland.
To an uninitiated observer, this does not appear immediately obvious. Does it not seem fair that the voting power of a country in an international organisation should be proportional to its population size? The answer is no. In fact, it is totally unfair. The reason is that effective voting power in multi-nation settings such as the EU depends not on voting size but on the ability to form winning coalitions. Large countries are better placed than their relative population size would suggest.
The original, six-member Community is a good example of this counter-intuitive idea. Germany, France and Italy each had four votes in the council of ministers, the Netherlands and Belgium had two and Luxembourg one vote. Germany then had more than 100 times the population of Luxembourg, yet only four times the number of votes.
Intuition might suggest that tiny Luxembourg was surely over-represented. In truth, the opposite was the case. The threshold for a majority was set at 12 votes. Since every member except Luxembourg had an even number of votes, Luxembourg was never in a position to cast a make-or-break vote. Despite being numerically over-represented, Luxembourg in effect had zero voting power. That would have been different if, for example, an odd number had been chosen as the threshold.
So how do you measure effective voting power? Lionel Penrose, the British mathematician and psychiatrist who developed a theory of voting power in the 1940s, concluded that votes in international organisations should be based on the square root of the population. This is where the Poles got their idea. In the 1960s, John Banzhaf, a US attorney, established an index to measure a country's voting power. There are two versions of the Banzhaf index. The absolute Banzhaf index measures the ability of a country to cast the decisive vote in a winning coalition as a proportion of all coalitions in which that country takes part. In the case of the pre-1973 EU, the absolute Banzhaf index for Luxembourg was precisely zero. For Germany it was 24 per cent. Germany, not Luxembourg, was over-represented.
What about the EU today? With 27 members, there are a total of 133m possible coalitions. The economists Richard Baldwin and Mika Widgrén have calculated the Banzhaf indices for each member state, both under the current regime, established by the treaty of Nice and in force since 2004, and the constitution*. The results clearly support the Polish case. Germany's absolute Banzhaf index shoots up from about 5 per cent to more than 15 per cent (it would have gone up to 30 per cent under the original draft). The trouble is that everyone's absolute Banzhaf index also goes up, including Poland's. How could that be?
The reason is that the constitution dramatically improves the probability of legislation being passed. Mathematically, the passage probability can be defined as the ratio of "winning" coalitions to all coalitions. In the 15-member EU, this ratio was 8 per cent (this means that 8 per cent of all possible coalitions produce a Yes vote). Under the Nice rules it has fallen to 3 per cent and will approach zero as the EU expands further. This is why the present voting system needs to be fixed.
The constitutional treaty raises this ratio to 13 per cent. But as the overall passage probability rises, so does a country's ability to cast a pivotal vote. This explains why the absolute Banzhaf index rises for everybody, including Poland. The Polish problem is that Germany's influence would be enormous in relative terms.
Is Poland's square root solution the only alternative? Of course not. EU leaders could, for example, raise the threshold for population size and number of countries from their 55 and 65 per cent respectively or introduce some complicated new formula - perhaps with a square root in it. There is a quite a bit a leeway left without creating Nice-style gridlock. Professors Baldwin and Widgrén propose another simple and effective solution: drop the voting rules of
the constitution and just repair the Nice rules by reducing some of the high thresholds.
The Poles have put their finger on an important issue, though their own answer is not as compelling as they think. If and when EU leaders set out to amend the rules, they should heed the lessons of the past. Any new system needs to fulfil two parallel goals: it needs to make the voting system more effective and it needs to be fair. The Nice system is fair and ineffective. The constitution is effective but unfair.
If they get this wrong again, they will be back at the negotiating table not too long from now. But if they get it right, they will have managed to create the one and only substantive change from the original treaty.
I hear it used in Southeast Asia a lot and thought it might be a linguistic holdover from the British colonial days here.
In the United States as far as I know we have always used the word "mathematics"
Yes. Even in India and Australia, the shorter form of the word, ‘mathematics’ is ‘maths’.
I thought in the USA you used the (even shorter) word “Math”? I keep seeing it in articles?
“Maths” is the preferred form in Commonwealth English, as opposed to the American term “math”.
Why not give them votes according to how much money the country is delivering to the common budget. It could be gross money or net money. If it is net money then the spending will decrease faster.
I was actually living in Nice when the EU summit was held on this very question. This was also at the time of the 2000 elections when Europeans were scratching their heads over the US Electoral College system.
The wisdom of our founding fathers became evident as the EU tried to do everything except “whatever America does.”
A lower house based on population, an upper house based on territory, an executive elected based on a winner take all electoral college system.
Hey, worked for us for more than 200 years...
Because the EU should not have budget at all. Anyway this would be the way to complete marginalizing of the new member states. If such argument would be clearly stated before they joined, perhaps they would stay outside. People who voted in all these referendums would be cheated.
I love my America very much, but I know that my tax dollars are funding abortions, hypodermic needles for drug addicts, and condoms for perverts as well as all the propaganda to spoil the souls of children with worse vice than these. Take it from an American who’s paying for my elders’ generation of drug induced sluttiness! More than a third of my salary goes to their pot, and those younger than me have it worse (lots of financial traps from wacky mortgages to credit card traps). Transferring our debt upon Asian shoulders may have a disastrous return.
Poland, don’t you fall under the EU spell. Make your own coalition of Catholic states if you have to. If other Europeans think that they can enslave your populace into paying for their laziness and sin, then Europeans will continue in their sloth feeling no threat of discomfort to change. Tell them to stop smoking the bong, start strengthening their Natural families and pay for their own retirement! Western Europeans have tried to use cheap Middle East labor and they’ve been repaid with riots and train bombs. Now, the’re trying to transfer their debt upon your shoulders.
Poland, you are on the dawn of a new economic era with Life defining the values in a real common market and not the flaky Culture of Death’s flash-in-the-pan products of frivolous toys you’d find in a hyper-inflated fad store. Your nation is better off tilling the soil and plying the seas (agriculture and industry) instead opening another t-shirt shop selling sex toys and drug paraphernalia (which is the type of services the secular would rather have you provide).
Resisting this style of mob and financial tyranny will be yet another defining moment in human history where Poland save Western Europe from itself—again!
£1,300,000,000,000 in debt...
...and this is only England. Want to be the one to shoulder this debt? Becoming low man on the totem pole with no real voting power means that you get to pay this off while Englishmen marry Englishmen and teach your sons to love little boys instead of little girls. If you have to inherit someone’s debt, then you should inherit their power as well.
America has large debt, but our gov’t also has “appropriated” huge amounts of land. If some nation wants to take our power with our debt, we can always take our debt back without losing power. Even though the real estate market is a little flat, we can still accept loads of willing AND law abiding LEGAL immigrants who’d love to purchase land with long term low interest loans. Don’t pay the debt, lose the land and get deported. Pay off the debt, get your land and citizenship.
Will England accept Hispanics? Hmmm, maybe our “amnesty” will come in the form of shipping illegal aliens in America to England to buy their real estate and pay off UK loans?
Maybe we should have more Poles filing for U.S. green cards. It’s not right to have such a large puddle of water between two great nations.
2+2=5 (for large values of 2)
Yes, it is a word, but it doesn’t help the headline. Too many headlines fail to give a clue what the essay topic might be.
That was my first thought too, but our system also depends on powers being divided in appropriate ways, and an orderly election schedule. The Europeans don't have a history of either of those (particularly the latter).
The only problem with the EU is that the solution already exists... and the Americans invented it.
Europeans do NOT understand that the “United States” began as a solution to the same problem that Europe now faces: separate, autonomous states coming together to form a union.
The articles of confederation showed how NOT to create a true federal system.
Fortunately our founding fathers didn’t have a “Great Satan” as a bugaboo and could modify the articles into a constitution.
If Europeans could get over their Ameriphobia for 10 minutes, they’d see the wisdom...
I totally agree, but the EU would have to pretty much just edit our whole Constitution. Separation of powers, Representation, orderly elections, an independent judiciary, - it all has to be consistent.
(And our Founding Fathers did that all in 6-7 pages. If that isn’t a clue to its brilliance, I don’t know what is. :-))
Agreed. The problem is that Europeans are used to authoritative central governments.Their only concern is getting a central government that does “what should be done.”
They have zero experience with the idea that individuals, if left to their own devices, will generally do the right thing.
The thing the IRKED me no end when living in France was the extent to which the average Frenchman had no confidence in his own ability to regulate his own affairs. It was always “the government should do something!”
I guess I won't ask how you feel about liberal Dems in the US. :-)
I think that goes without
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