New winners and old losers: a priori voting power in the EU25

Summary:

Analysis of the development of power distributions is one of the core tasks of political science. How much do the EU member states have a priori voting power in the Council of Ministers? In particular, what have the modifications in the voting weights after the various enlargements meant for the distribution of a priori voting power in the Council?

We will in the following use the standardized Penrose-Banzhaf-index when analyzing the distribution of power among member-states (Banzhaf 1965 and Penrose 1946) (cf. Raunio and Wiberg 1998 and 2002).