EU decision-making

Résumé du document

France is administratively divided in “communes”, the smallest territorial division of the country, usually corresponding to a city or a village. The number of communes in France, including overseas territories, is 36 782. This high number leads to huge disparities in terms of population and geographical surface. For instance, 90% of the communes have less than 2000 inhabitants and only a hundred have more than 50 000 inhabitants. To make their administrative management easier, the state decided in 1971 with the law “Marcellin” to give the possibility for neighbouring communes to gather in a collective structure (hereafter called intercommunalité) in order to develop common projects. The idea is that two communes would be financially better-off in supplying together a public good, a swimming-pool for instance, that would be accessible to their inhabitants

Extraits

[...] The notion of power is important in intercommunalités for the decisions on supplying local public goods. We can indeed expect that the commune with the most power will likely be the one where attractive public goods will be built (crèche, pools, parks ) and unattractive public goods will be settled further away from it (rubbish dump). However, it is not because a commune has more delegates than others that it has the most power. This is the idea underlying theories of voting power index. [...]

[...] In our case, we could also think that geography is an important element: communes that are next to eachother are likely to vote together in order to have the public good supplied in their area (or far away if the good is non- beneficial). In that sense, we can expect that two communes that are geographically distant have fewer probabilities to form a coalition than neighbouring ones. References: Baldwin, R., and Widgrén, M. (2004) ‘Winners and losers under various dual majority rules for the EU's Council of Ministers', CEPS discussion paper 4450, pp. 1-32 Felsenthal, D.S., and Machover. M. (2005) ‘Voting power measurement: a story of misreinvention', Social choice and welfare, Vol pp. [...]

[...] EU decision-making France is administratively divided in “communes”, the smallest territorial division of the country, usually corresponding to a city or a village. The number of communes in France, including overseas territories, is This high number leads to huge disparities in terms of population and geographical surface. For instance of the communes have less than 2000 inhabitants and only a hundred have more than inhabitants. To make their administrative management easier, the state decided in 1971 with the law “Marcellin” to give the possibility for neighbouring communes to gather in a collective structure (hereafter called intercommunalité) in order to develop common projects. [...]

[...] We expected that Boulogne-sur-mer would have the biggest power, and what is interesting to notice is that even though there is a law stipulating that a commune cannot have more than half of the seats, in reality it is possible to have a commune which has de facto more than half of the power: on a hundred decisions, Boulogne-sur-mer is needed, i.e. is pivotal times in order to pass a decision. What we could finally wonder is whether there are other factors that need to be taken into account in order to measure the exact power of the intercommunalité. First of all, the hypothesis that all voting sequences are equally possible does not hold in reality. Indeed, political preferences often play a crucial role in building coalition. [...]

[...] Shapley and Shubik argued that the sum of all decisive positions of a grouping, that is when it was pivotal, compared to the number of possible voting sequences gives a value that represents the power of this coalition[2]. In other words, a player's power is proportional to the number of times he is critical. Decisions at the Council of the CAB are taken by simple majority, therefore twenty-eight votes are needed to pass a decision (i.e. the quota or majority threshold is equal to 28). [...]