Abstract
ABSTRACT Even the best existing model of legislative decisionmaking in the European Union, the compromise model, makes huge prediction errors when it is assumed that each actor’s power is determined by their formal voting weight. A few studies have attempted to improve the model’s predictive accuracy by examining alternative distributions of power, but extending their brute force approach poses daunting computational challenges. In this paper I illustrate how techniques from evolutionary computing can be employed to overcome these challenges. I then demonstrate the new possibilities that this approach opens up by identifying the relative power of each actor that best predicts policy outcomes from the EU-15 period. Some actors appear to punch significantly above or below their formal weight, with power varying dramatically across legislative procedures. My analysis highlights important unanswered questions about power in EU decisionmaking, and potentially indicates fundamental problems with the compromise model or the underlying data.
Highlights
IntroductionThe European Union (EU) may have no independent military capabilities and a tiny central budget, but each year it adopts hundreds of new laws
If there is one thing that the European Union (EU) does, it legislates
The motivations for this article were the twin facts that formal voting power is undeniably a poor predictor of legislative decisionmaking outcomes in the European Union, and that extending previous attempts to improve the predictive accuracy of the field’s leading model by replacing formal power with estimated informal power posed daunting computational challenges
Summary
The EU may have no independent military capabilities and a tiny central budget, but each year it adopts hundreds of new laws This massive corpus of rules creates an internal market amongst the (currently) 27 Member States, regulates the characteristics of traded goods and services, sets agricultural subsidies, establishes common environmental standards, gov erns food safety and other risks, manages external trade with the rest of the world and much else. That the EU does so much that is clearly not trivial raises questions about the relative power of each actor in EU legislative decisionmaking, and who is best able to achieve their desired policy outcomes. Numerous regression studies have found that states with more votes in the Council do no better, or do consistently worse than
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