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Qualified Majority Voting and Power Indices: A Further Response to Johnston
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2009
Extract
If their treatment of power indices is anything to go by, reputable social scientists have a surprising tendency to lose touch with reality when using elementary mathematics. R. J. Johnston's article in this Journal is (unfortunately) a good illustration of this. The subsequent exchange between Johnston and Garrett, McLean and Machover also fails to get to the heart of the matter.
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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 Page numbers in the text between these numbers refer to this article.
2 Garrett, Geoffrey M., McLean, Iain and Machover, Moshé, ‘Power, Power Indices and Blocking Power: A Comment on Johnston’, British Journal of Political Science, 25 (1995) 563–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johnston, R. J., ‘Can Power be Reduced to a Quantitative Index–And If So, Which One? A Response to Garrett, McLean and Machover’, British Journal of Political Science, 25 (1995), 568–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Page numbers in the text between these numbers refer to these articles.
3 In the event, Norway voted against joining the EU, which was therefore expanded to fifteen countries; but this does not affect the issue that Johnston addresses of whether Major's stand at the time was sensible.
4 Strictly speaking, you can have the same amount of power as another voter, even though you have more votes (as when voters have 3, 2, 2 votes, with the required majority being 4), but you cannot have more votes and less power than another.
5 Originally presented in Banzhaf, J. F., ‘Weighted Voting Doesn't Work: A Mathematical Analysis’, Rutgers Law Review, 19 (1965), 317–43.Google Scholar
6 See Morriss, Peter, Power: A Philosophical Analysis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988)Google Scholar, Part IV. The whole of this part (pp. 154–97) considers mathematical power indices; but possibly my subtitle has served to hide this.
7 See Morriss, , Power, pp. 184–6Google Scholar, for a more exhaustive demonstration.
8 Garrett et al. point out that such a negative policy might have been unwise–p. 564 fn.4–but they accept that it is a common ground for this discussion.
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