The European Parliament after Brexit

Abstract

The allocation of seats in the European Parliament (EP) according to the Treaty of Lisbon, must comply with the principle of degressive proportionality. The rule can be either in the form of rounded degressive proportionality or unrounded degressive proportionality. This paper deals with expected compositions of the EP after the likely exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union bodies. We present the allocations of seats among the member states generated by means of simulation algorithms selected from the literature. These allocations are mostly unrounded degressively proportional, whereas using the approach developed in previous papers and considering all feasible allocations, we always achieve rounded degressively proportional allocations. We discuss the attained results and indicate the most appropriate allocation and methodology.