Date of Award
Spring 2013
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science
Department
Mathematics
First Advisor
Dr. Kathy Hoke
Second Advisor
Dr. Olena Mykhaylova
Third Advisor
Dr. Lester Caudill
Abstract
The Treaty of Lisbon, the latest treaty governing law-making in the European Union (EU), was ratified in 2009 and goes fully into effect in 2014. This treaty, with its change to voting procedures in the Council of Ministers, claims to make decision-making in the EU more democratic and more efficient. Since the EU serves as an economic and political entity, we will assess these claims by comparing each member state's GDP and population to its power as modeled using the concept of a power index from the game theory literature. We will utilize the normalized Banzhaf index, the Shapley-Shubik index, the position value with no assumptions about which member states are likely to cooperate, and the position value under the assumption that Germany and France have a key central role in decision-making. We will show that in general these power indices support the claims of a more democratic and a more efficient voting process when looking at the entire EU, but they do not support the claims when restricting the analysis to the EU members who have adopted the euro. Finally, we add the European Parliament to our model and show that under the Treaty of Lisbon, power is not as evenly distributed between the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament as one may expect at first glance.
Recommended Citation
Steele, Dayton, "Power distribution in the European Union" (2013). Honors Theses. 9.
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/honors-theses/9