Voting Power and Coalition Formation: The Case of the Council of the EU

In this paper we study the distribution of power in the Council of the European Union (EU). The goal of this paper is to evaluate the voting power of the member states after the entry of Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC). The analysis is based on the Shapley-Shubik power index of simple cooperative games. Modified versions of the Shapley-Shubik index are used to analyse the influence of sub-systems of the EU on the distribution of power in the decision making process.