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Qualified Majority Voting and Power Indices: A Further Response to Johnston

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Peter Morriss
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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.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , October 1996 , pp. 595 - 597
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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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.