This article deals with the design of voting rules in the European Union (EU) Council. Both internal and external impact of the voting rules are examined. Internal impact affects the distribution of power among the Member States, and external impact affects power relations between the main...

This paper deals with the design of voting rules in the EU Council. Both internal and external impact of the voting rules are examined. Internal impact affects the distribution of power among the member states and external impact affects power relations between the main decision-making bodies in...

The European Union’s senior legislative body, the Council, can make decisions either by unanimity or by a qualified majority vote (QMV). When unanimity is required, each Member State can block the action by voting against the matter at hand. When QMV applies, EU action can be taken over the...

Motivated by the need for more flexible decision-making mechanisms in the European Union, the paper proposes a simple but novel voting scheme for binary decisions taken by committees that meet regularly over time. At each meeting, committee members are allowed to store their vote for future use;...

The thesis of this paper is that more transparent, rule-bound and subtle mechanisms for policy coordination will be needed to ensure the success of an enlarged European Union. A common policy is a public good with distributional implications. Economists have developed a large number of plausible...