This paper compares legislative dynamics under all procedures in which the Council of Ministers votes by qualified majority (QMV). We make five major points. First, the EU governments have sought to reduce the democratic deficit by increasing the powers of the European Parliament since 1987,...

Jan-Erik Lane and Sven Berg, and Manfred Holler and Mika Widgrén, agree that power index analysis of the EU cannot take into account its institutional structure. For us, this is a sufficient condition for its failure as a research program. Nonetheless, they go on to argue that power indices are...

The temptation to apply power indices to decision-making in the European Union should be resisted for two reasons. First, power index approaches either ignore the policy preferences of relevant actors in the EU or incorporate them in ways that generate unstable and misleading results. Second, no...