Square root voting in the Council of the European Union: Rounding effects and the Jagiellonian Compromise

Abstract

In recent years, enlargement of the European Union has brought with it renewed discussion of voting arrangements in the Council of the EU. During these negotiations, the Polish government proposed a voting scheme that gives each country a voting weight proportional to the square root of its population, and sets a quota according to an optimality condition ("Jagiellonian Compromise"). In this paper, the optimal quota is found exactly for the current population data from the 27 EU member states, and it is found that rounding of the voting weights can be used to improve the voting scheme.