An Analysis of EU Voting Procedures in the Enlargement Context

摘要

The problem of a fair and effective voting system in the EU deserves particular emphasis, due to the fact that several issues to be agreed upon concern matters of crucial national interest. The aim of this paper is to assess, in the enlargement context, the advantages and disadvantages of different voting systems within the EU, studying the statistical distributions of the rate of winning and blocking coalitions on the basis of a simulation model. The different scenarios of the voting procedures' results confirm the positive effects of the Penrose square root rule, which remains the only valid voting system to be adopted in the future for the main EU decision-making bodies.