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In the debate on how to strengthen the European Union's (EU) capacity to act, calls for an extension of qualified majority voting (QMV) are growing louder. The Council of the EU is currently discussing using the so-called passerelle clauses in the Treaty on European Union (TEU). With these clauses, more decisions by QMV could be intro­duced without a major treaty change or a convention. However, abolishing national vetoes in this way would first require unanimity as well as, in some cases, additional national approval procedures. Such unanimity is currently not in sight, as resistance is prevailing in smaller and medium-sized member states, which fear that they could be regularly outvoted. What is needed, therefore, is an institutional reform package in which decisions by QMV are extended with the aim of facilitating further enlargement of the EU and are accompanied by emergency clauses to protect core national interests. (author's abstract)

The Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) is one of the EU's last bastions of unanimous decision-making. The idea of introducing qualified majority Voting (QMV) is as old as the policy area itself.

The European Union integration undergoes various long dynamic processes. Based on the views of academics, integration is defined as an effort to hand over all state functions to supranational organizations. The use of Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) is considered as an attempt to make the Council of Ministers a supranational institution. With the existence of QMV, member countries can no longer freely reject policies that are very likely to be carried out in the unanimous mechanism that has been implemented previously. After the implementation of the 2009 Lisbon Treaty, policymaking in the Council of Ministers will use the double majority mechanism which came into force on November 1, 2014. Basically, the double majority is an extension of the QMV mechanism by adding certain criteria in determining the majority of votes. There are three criteria that must be met in the double majority mechanism such as population criteria, supporting member countries criteria, and blocking criteria. The implication is that a country will find it difficult to unilaterally oppose the policies being discussed in the Council of Ministers. The reduced power of the state in the policy-making process indicates that the Council of Ministers continues to evolve towards a supranational institution. Based on these facts, the supranational of the Council of Ministers that develops through the use of the QMV mechanism will have a positive impact on the integration of the European Union as a whole.

If their treatment of power indices is anything to go by, reputable social scientists have a surprising tendency to lose touch with reality when using elementary mathematics. R. J. Johnston's article in this Journal is (unfortunately) a good illustration of this. The subsequent exchange between Johnston and Garrett, McLean and Machover also fails to get to the heart of the matter.

This study probes the way in which the use of the qualified majority voting has developed in the Council of the European Union. The investigation begins with the Single European Act, which expanded the field of decision making by qualified majority in an effort to facilitate the adoption of the directives concerning the Single Market. Quantitative data and interviews with members of the Council point to unexpected continuity. • The number of legislative acts adopted despite negative votes and abstentions was low throughout the period investigated (on average, less than a quarter of the documents requiring a qualified majority). • Yet the search for a qualified majority rather than for universal agreement is the driving force behind negotiations. The negotiators' main goal is to determine whether or not there is a blocking minority against any given decision. The existence or the absence of such a minority determines the moment when the presidency of the Council proposes a document's adoption. Today as in the past, concern over effectiveness explains why the presidency resorts to the use of a qualified majority as a weapon of dissuasion towards negotiators who fear ending up in a minority. 2 - Qualified majority voting from the Single European Act to the present day: an unexpected permanence • Despite this, the minutes of these Council meetings point to a low opposition and abstention rate, because ministers who fail to gain satisfaction tend to rally to the majority once they know that a measure is going to be adopted. • The publication of votes, which began in 1993, has not put paid to this strategy. Most decisions are taken by the preparatory committees that prepare Council meetings (Coreper and Special Committee on Agriculture), but the measures have to be officially adopted by the Council of Ministers, which gives the member states the opportunity to rally to the majority between the time a measure is unofficially agreed on and the moment it is officially adopted. • However, ministers of member states in which there is stringent parliamentary oversight cannot avail themselves of that opportunity. Thus it is going to be necessary to assess the extent to which the increase in national parliaments' role laid down in the Treaty of Lisbon has a practical impact on voting in the Council.