A Comparative Analysis of Reverse Majority Voting : The WTO's Dispute Settlement Mechanism, the EU Anti-Dumping Policy and the Reinforced SGP and Fiscal Compact

The reinforced Stability and Growth Pact entered into force in December 2011 with a new set of rules for economic and fiscal surveillance of the EU Member States. To strengthen the effective enforcement the SGP introduced the policy innovation of reverse qualified majority voting in the EU Council. Under reverse qualified majority voting the European Commission can impose a sanction on a Member State unless the Council votes against with a qualified majority within a specified period. This paper discusses the motivation and the impact of the new voting rule on EU Council decision-making and the Member States. It presents a comparative analysis of three cases where different types of reverse majority voting have been introduced, i.e. the dispute settlement mechanism of the World Trade Organisation, the EU trade defence policy and the reinforced SGP and Fiscal Compact. The comparison demonstrates that reverse majority voting considerably lowers the majority threshold to pass proposals rendering their adoption almost automatic in the EU Council of Ministers. As a result, the reverse majority rule increases the discretion of the executive relative to the legislative power. Moreover, evidence from the WTO’s dispute settlement and the EU’s antidumping policy suggests that the automaticity is also likely to change the balance between the rule- and political-based decision-making in the area of fiscal and budgetary EU policy. These findings chime with the growing role of majority-based decision-making in an enlarged EU of 27 Member States. However, the findings also highlight the potential trade-off between decision-making capacity and legitimacy particularly in an area considered to be traditionally part of the EU Member States’ national sovereignty