Power, Connected Coalitions, and Efficiency: Challenges to the Council of the European Union

This article is concerned with challenges to reforming the voting procedures of the Council of the European Union (EU). The next major waves of EU enlargement will cause the Union to increase to a membership of first twenty-one, and then twenty-six or possibly even more states. How does enlargement affect the Council's inherent "capacity to act" under the currently used qualified majority voting rule? It is demon strated here that the expected increase in EU membership will most likely induce a larger "status quo bias" as compared to the present situation in the Council if the crucial majority decision quota is not lowered. In addition, the article is responding to some criticism that has been applied against assessing the leverage of EU governments in one of the EU's most important institutions: the Council of the EU. By resorting to techniques that capture the influence of a priori coalitions on the one hand and "connected coalitions" among EU governments on the other—applying n- person cooperative game theory—the piece illustrates how the assessment of relative voting leverage in the framework of weighted voting systems may be extended and applied to situations in which the specific distribu tion of members' preferences is known. These calculations are again relevant in the face of the upcoming rounds of EU enlargement and projects for institutional reform.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68064/2/10.1177_019251219902000404.pd

A comparison of cartesian genetic programming and linear genetic programming

Abstract. Two prominent genetic programming approaches are the graph-based Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) and Linear Genetic Programming (LGP). Recently, a formal algorithm for constructing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) from a classical LGP instruction sequence has been established. Given graphbased LGP and traditional CGP, this paper investigates the similarities and differences between the two implementations, and establishes that the significant difference between them is each algorithm’s means of restricting interconnectivity of nodes. The work then goes on to compare the performance of two representations each (with varied connectivity) of LGP and CGP to a directed cyclic graph (DCG) GP with no connectivity restrictions on a medical classification and regression benchmark

Myths and meanings of voting power : comments on a symposium

These are comments on the Symposium 'Power Indices and the European Union' in the July 1999 issue of this Journal. We point out several common inter-connected confusions and errors concerning the meaning of voting power. We stress the vital distinction between two different intuitive notions of voting power. We emphasize the need for a unified approach to the study of a priori and actual voting power. We show that the family of 'strategic' measures proposed by some of the participants in the Symposium are a natural generalization of the Banzhaf measure