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Power, Power Indices and Blocking Power: A Comment on Johnston

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Geoffrey M. Garrett ,
Iain McLean  and
Moshé Machover
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Extract

R. J. Johnston produces two striking and counter-intuitive results on bargaining power in a European Union Council of Ministers expanded by the addition of the four states applying for entry in 1994. One is that the ‘big four’ member states, including the United Kingdom, have more power if the minority with power to block a proposal is set at 27 rather than 23. UK Prime Minister John Major damaged himself politically by first insisting that he would veto a proposal to increase the blocking threshold from 23 to 27 and then being forced to climb down from this position. As Johnston notes, this episode ‘led to several calls for his resignation from among his own party's MPs, including one in the House itself’. If British interests, as seen by the Euro-sceptics whom Mr Major was vainly trying to appease, were actually better served by a threshold of 27 than of 23, his actions appear doubly futile. This is apparent by reading across Johnston's Table 1, using either of the indices he proposes.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , October 1995 , pp. 563 - 568
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 Johnston, R. J., ‘The Conflict over Qualified Majority Voting in the European Union Council of Ministers: An Analysis of the UK Negotiating Stance Using Power Indices’, British Journal of Political Science, 25 (1995), 245–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 The defeat of the proposal to join the European Union (EU) in the Norwegian referendum of November 1994 deeply affects the politics of EU membership, but not the logic of either Johnston's argument or our comment on it.

3 Originally defined, respectively, by Shapley, L. S. and Shubik, M., ‘A Method of Evaluating the Distribution of Power in a Committee System’, American Political Science Review, 48 (1954), 787–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Banzhaf, J. F. III, ‘Weighted Voting Doesn't Work: A Mathematical Analysis’, Rutgers Law Review, 19 (1965), 317–43Google Scholar; Deegan, J. Jr and Packel, E. W., ‘A New Index of Power for Simple n-Person Games’, International Journal of Game Theory, 7 (1979), 113–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Johnston, R. J., ‘On the Measurement of Power: Some Reactions to Laver’, Environment and Planning A, 10 (1978), 907–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 It might be argued that British national interests need to be characterized in a more sophisticated way than is done by either Johnston or ourselves. Some interests wish lo prevent the Council from doing things in Britain, such as impose obligations derived from the Social Chapter. Other interests wish to make the Council do things in other member states, such as deregulate national monopolies or reform the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Because of the perversity of power indices, it is hard to advise either group what their optimal voting rule is. It will certainly not be the same for both groups.

5 Johnston, , ‘Conflict over Qualified Majority’, pp. 246–8.Google Scholar

6 Johnston, , ‘Conflict over Qualified Majority’, p. 248.Google Scholar

7 Brams, S. J., Negotiation Games: Applying Game Theory to Bargaining and Arbitration (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 232–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Banzhaf, , ‘Weighted Voting Doesn't Work’, p. 331. Our italics.Google Scholar

9 Brams, , Negotiating Games, p. 232.Google Scholar

10 Johnston, , ‘On the Measurement of Power’, p. 909.Google Scholar

11 Johnston, R. J., ‘National Sovereignty and National Power in European Institutions’, Environment and Planning A, 9 (1977), 569–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Johnston, , ‘Conflict over Qualified Majority’, p. 246–8.Google Scholar

13 See further Holler, M. J., ‘Forming Coalitions and Measuring Voting Power’, Political Studies, 30 (1982), 262–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Felsenthal, D. S. and Machover, M., ‘Postulates and Paradoxes of Relative Voting Power: A Critical Reappraisal’ (paper presented at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the Public Choice Society, Austin, Texas).Google Scholar

14 Banzhaf indices for the proposed sixteen-member Council of Ministers have been calculated by Madelaine O. Hosli (see ‘Admission of European Free Trade Association states to the European Community: Effects on Voting Power in the EC Council of Ministers’, International Organization, 47 (1993), 629–43Google Scholar). For a blocking minority of 27, the Banzhaf weights are: for each state with 10 votes, 0.1078; for Spain, with 8 votes, 0.0880; for each state with 5 votes, 0.0568; for each state with 4 votes, 0.0475; for each state with 3 votes, 0.0336; for Luxembourg, with 2 votes, 0.0241.

15 For a good discussion of the differences between these two assumptions, see Laver, Michael and Schofield, Norman, Multiparty Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

16 This is Ihe classic scenario with respect to completing the internal market.

17 For simplicity, assume that all the governments in QM – 1 have the same ideal points. If this is relaxed to allow governments lo have distinct policy preferences, the government with the ideal point closest to that of Country 2 would be the operative player in the following analysis.

18 However, this is not how many decisions are taken in the European Union today. The Council is the dominant actor in those areas covered by the ‘consultation’ procedure, but increasingly this decision-making procedure is being supplanted by the ‘co-operation’ and ‘co-decision’ procedures in which the Commission and the European Parliament play significant roles. For analyses of these procedures, see Garrett, Geoffrey, ‘Cooperation, Co-Decision and Ihe European Union's Internal Market’ (unpublished paper, Stanford University, 1994)Google Scholar, and Tsebelis, George, ‘The Power of the European Parliament as a Conditional Agenda Setter’, American Political Science Review, 88 (1994), 128–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 See, for example, Garrett, Geoffrey, ‘International Cooperation and Institutional Choice’, International Organization, 46 (1992), 533–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Moravcsik, Andrew, ‘Negotiating the Single European Act’, International Organization, 45 (1991), 19–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar