The rise of euroscepticism in the European council after brexit: should decision-making rules from the treaty of Lisbon be revised

• Autor(a) principal: Araujo, Lina Francisca Novais
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/142252
• topic: European Union; Euroscepticism; Collective decision-making; Banzhaf index; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

The Treaty of Lisbon was drafted to support the desire of an expanding European Union. It created a bias towards large Member States, and only considered the possibility for new accessions. However, Brexit proved that Euroscepticism is a real concern, and further increased the gap between large and small Member States. In this paper, we look at the post-Brexit redistribution of voting power and its impact on the dynamics inside the European Council. By examining multiple scenarios with the Banzhaf index, we conclude that the(Eurosceptic) Visegrád Group has the potential to become the new opposition force inside the EU, attaining a greater Banzhaf index than Germany. We there fore focus on a possible redesign of the double-majority rule and conclude that a scenario where the country quota increases by five percentage points is the one better approximating the Council to pre-Brexit levels.