Voting in The Council of The European Union - Qualified Majority Voting

Qualified Majority Voting

This section presents the former, current, and proposed qualified majority voting systems employed in the Council of the European Union, and its predecessor institutions. While some policy areas require unanimity among all Council members, for selected policy areas qualified majority voting has existed right from the start. All major treaties have shifted some policy areas from unanimity to qualified majority voting.

Whenever the community was enlarged, voting weights for new members were defined and thresholds re-adjusted by accession treaties. After its inception in 1958, the most notable changes to the voting system occurred:

• with the 1973 enlargement, when the number of votes for the largest member states was increased from 4 to 10,
• with the Treaty of Nice, when the maximum number of votes was increased to 29, thresholds became defined in terms of percentages, and a direct population-dependent condition was introduced,
• with the Treaty of Lisbon, when the concept of votes was abandoned in favor of a "double majority" depending only on the number of states and the population represented.

All systems prescribed higher thresholds for passing acts that were not proposed by the Commission. Member states have to cast their votes en bloc (i.e., a member state may not split its votes). Hence, the number of votes rather describes the weight of a member's single vote.

The analysis of the distribution of voting power under different voting rules in the EU Council often requires the use of complex computational methods that go beyond a mere calculation of vote share, such as the Shapley-Shubik index or the Banzhaf measure.