The article analyses the potential impact of Brexit and the new legal framework for European statistics in demography on the formal voting power of Poland in the Council of the European Union, in the case of adopting decisions by the qualified majority of votes. The leading hypothesis of the paper assumes that the fact of leaving the European Union by Great Britain and the new method of determining the population of EU Member States for the purposes of making decisions in the Council of the European Union leads to another transfer of formal voting power to the benefit of countries with the largest populations, as well as reduces the ability of Poland to build strictly minimally blocking coalitions, in particular in opposition to the coalition being formed by France and Germany or the so-called “Trio of Ventotene”.

James S. Coleman proposed the power of a collectivity to act as a measure of the ease with which the individual interests of one member can be transformed into the collective action of a voting body, or into decisions being undertaken by that body which go against the interests of the voters. It was also to be applied in simple voting games, for which the vote threshold was set at a lower level than the majority of votes. Coleman based his model for determining the power of a collectivity to act on the classical definition of probability. In practice, the index is calculated as a quotient of the number of winning coalitions and of all possible coalitions which can be formed by the players – under the existing voting rule. The central hypothesis of the article has as its premise that in proper, simple nperson voting games the Coleman index does not determine passage probability, but only the probability of drawing a winning coalition from the set of all possible combinations of members of the voting body. A new index has also been proposed which should serve to determine a collectivity’s power to act.

Analysis Of The Structure Of Blocking As An Alternative To The Application Of The Power Index Approach

The article presents the analysis of structure of blocking, an original research technique based on the voting games theory, but departing from the assumption that all possible coalitions are equally likely. The analysis is focused on the players’ ability to build minimal blocking coalitions, and thus on the structure of blocking for voting game. Blocking coalition is understood as collective veto player, which have the right, under voting rule, to block change of the status quo. The proposed research technique provides an alternative for the application of the power index approach to the voting bodies such as the Council of the European Union. Hence, the aim of this work is to fill methodological gap in the research on the voting systems.