Bridging qualified majority and unanimity decisionmaking in the EU

Majority voting leads to unanimity

We consider a situation where society decides, through majority voting in a secret ballot, between the alternatives of ‘reform’ and ‘status quo’. Reform is assumed to create a minority of winners, while being efficient in the Kaldor–Hicks sense.We explore the consequences of allowing binding transfers between voters conditional on the chosen alternative. In particular, we establish conditions u...

Qualified Preliminary EU - ACP

Unanimity Overruled: Majority Voting and the Burden of History

Sequential majority voting over interconnected binary propositions can lead to the overruling of unanimous consensus. We characterize, within the general framework of judgement aggregation, under what circumstances this happens for some sequence of the voting process. It turns out that the class of aggregation spaces for which this difficulty arises is very large, including the aggregation of p...

Strategic Voting under the Qualified Majority Rule

This is an analysis of strategic voting under the qualified majority rule. Existing formal analyses of the plurality rule predict the complete coordination of strategic voting: A strict interpretation of Duverger’s Law. This conclusion is rejected. Unlike previous models, the popular support for each option is not commonly certain. Agents base their vote on both public and private signals of po...

From Consumer Decision to Market Share - Unanimity of Majority?

We use a general cellular automata model to study the consumer decision-making process. Within this generalmodelweuse threedi erent rules governingword-of-mouthcommunication (w-o-m), onemajority rule and two unanimity rules, and ask the question if di erences between these three w-o-m rules, introduced on the microscopic level, will manifest on the macroscopic level. We show that in the model w...