Reweighting the votes in the council of ministers (double simple majority voting rule and the nice compromise)

In this paper we provide an analysis of the Commission's proposal of so called double simple majority rule (when to pass a decision simple majority of Member States and at the same time simple majority of total population has to be reached) for the voting in the Council of Ministers of the EU. In our evaluation we are using an a priori voting power methodology to measure an influence of the Member States before and after extension of the EU. In the closing part of the paper we shortly compare the double simple majority rule to the compromise approved by the 2000 Nice Summit of the EU.