Post-Brexit council: winners and losers after the UK’s withdrawal from the EU

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the impact of Brexit on the voting system in the Council. For this purpose, the study is developing a new voting model which abandons the assumption that each coalition of players is equally likely. The analysis focuses on the structure of blocking for the voting game. I find that for seven most populous Member States, Brexit has had profound effects on their ability to build minimal blocking coalitions in the Council when QMV is used. The Germany’s ability to build the smallest blocking coalitions has increased dramatically. The position of Italy and Spain, and consequently that of the Mediterranean states, has also been strengthening. Moreover, France has become a pivotal player in the disputes between the North and the South. These findings have important implications for institutional design, negotiations between Member States in the Council and the European Commission’s legislative influence as an agenda-setter.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexit
• Council of the European Union
• blocking coalition
• voting power
• coalition building
• QMV

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their excellent feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The author confirms that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article, its supplementary materials and from the following resources available in the public domain: Eurostat, Usually resident population on 1 January [last update on 5 November 2021], https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/demo_urespop/default/table?lang=en&category=demo.demo_pop. Office for National Statistics (2021). United Kingdom population mid-year estimate [Release date: 25 June 2021]. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/timeseries/ukpop/pop.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2024.2385035

Notes

1. Adoption of an act requires the approval of 72% of Member States if the act has not been proposed by the European Commission (EC) or the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

2. When not all Council members participate in the vote where decision is made on the initiative of the EC or the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, the qualified majority is at least 55% of the members of the Council representing the participating member states, the total population of which is at least 65% of the population of these countries. A blocking minority in such a case must include a minimum number of Council members representing more than 35% of the population of participating countries, plus one additional member (TFEU: art. 238(2)).

3. Also referred to as the Penrose-Banzhaf index.

4. The study uses the term ‘large Member States’, which means EU countries with a population of more than 35 million, i.e., Germany (82.1 m), France (67.4 m), Italy (59.6 m), Spain (47.4 m) and Poland (37.8 m).

5. In the classical literature on voting power, a player (voter) is called a critical member of a winning coalition if the coalition needs to have that player’s votes to win.

6. The blocking power can be defined as the capability of a member of a voting body to block any decision they oppose.

7. The Big Four comprises Germany, France, Italy and Spain. Each of these states has more than 10% of the total EU population.

8. The success of Presidency is often assessed based on the number of closed dossiers.

9. Häge (2013, 482) defines consensus decision making as ‘the adoption of a collective decision without contesting votes’.

10. When political pressure is strong and the stakes in negotiations are high, governments of Member States are less willing and able to reach an agreement through arguing or discussion on merits (Naurin 2010).

11. Firstly, enacting a policy change is always associated with uncertainty about the production of projected outcomes. If this uncertainty reaches a certain (subjectively determined) level, risk-averse players are rather likely to support keeping the status quo. Secondly, the short-term benefits of changing the status quo may conflict with the player’s long-term strategic goals.

12. The New Hanseatic League (also called New Hansa or the Hanseatic League 2.0) was established in February 2018 by the ministers of finance of Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Sweden.

13. Representatives of these countries are invited to NB6 meetings.

14. The Group was established in December 2013 by the foreign ministers of Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain.

15. Thus the analysis focuses on the five lowest levels of blocking structure (k_max - k_min +1 = 5).

16. Laruelle and Valenciano (2005, 173) understand a ‘voting situation’ as ‘a situation in which a set of voters faces decision-making according to the specifications of a voting procedure’, while they define ‘voting rule’ as a ‘well-specified procedure for making decisions by the vote of any kind of committee of a certain number of members’.

17. The impact of the use of a non-random voting model on the value of indices of voting power in the Council depends on the construction of a given index. In the case of the Normalized Banzhaf Index and Preventive Power Index, the differences are very small. However, the adoption of a non-random voting model leads to a profound change in the voting power measured by Coleman’s Power to Initiate Index (Kleinowski 2024).

18. However, in real-life voting situations, an abstention is often treated by the players as a distinct tertium quid, whose effect is not always the same as that of a ‘no’ (Felsenthal and Machover 1998, 21–22).

19. For example, considering the assumed data regarding the population of EU Member States, post Brexit 3,579,462 MBCs can theoretically be formed. After including the assumptions made for this analysis, the number decreases over 14.5 times to 244,043 coalitions.

20. The three large Member States have relatively easily been able to build a blocking coalition both in the Nice and in the ‘double majority’ voting system. However, the political power of such a group cannot be reduced only to the weight of their vote.

21. The coefficient $\mathit{\beta }\left(\mathit{i}\right)$ can be also interpreted as a specific example of the coefficient of blocking power created by Sozański (2010). However, unlike his version, this one is not used to measure the blocking power where a player has to take into account the MBCs of the size ranging from k_min to k_max, where k_min ≠ k_max.

22. Being highly dependent on one partner in building blocking coalitions can lead to the formation of a clientelistic relation.

23. For the purpose of QMV in the Council, the EU population is construed as the total number of usual residents from all Member States (Regulation 1260/2013, Article 5).

24. For example, before Brexit, the sum of the populations of Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Romania was too small for them to form a blocking coalition. However, they could build twenty MBCs consisting of five Council members without the participation of another large state. After Brexit, these countries can build MBC, as well as twenty blocking fives which are not MBCs.

25. Moreover, with such a radical change in the blocking structure as in the case of Germany, drawing conclusions solely on the basis of the change in the β_k(i) factor may lead to erroneous conclusions.

26. By comparison, Spain can build 528 such coalitions (see Table 2 in Appendix III).

27. Detailed data is provided in Table 16 in Appendix III.

28. The exception is France, whose coefficient ${\beta }_k\left(\mathit{i}\right)$ has decreased by 4% points in case of blocking sevens.

29. In general, large Member States are among the most frequently contesting (by opposing or abstaining) decisions in the Council.

30. However, it should be additionally stipulated that a decision in the Council cannot be adopted if the majority does not represent more than 50% of the EU’s total population.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland, as part of project No. [UMO-2016/23/D/HS5/00408] entitled The Impact of Brexit and Unconditional Introduction of the “Double Majority” Voting System on the Decision-Making Process in the Council of the European Union.