Voting by Count and Account:
Reconciling Power and Equality in International
Organizations
Barry
O'Neill
Center
for International Security and Cooperation
Stanford
University
and
Bezalel
Peleg
Center
for Rationality and Interactive Decision Theory
August
2000
Abstract: Organizations whose members are national governments face a
recurring problem in choosing a voting mechanism: they need one that recognizes
the greater power and contribution of the larger members while preserving some
influence for the smaller ones. Voting
by count and account is suggested here as a good compromise between power and
equality. Passing a motion requires
both a majority by numbers and a majority by some weight of importance, like
financial contribution. It avoids
certain surprising counterintuitive results produced by other systems now used
to give some power to small states, such as weighted voting. For international organizations it is the
natural analogue of a two-house system.
Changing
the voting methods of an existing body is difficult, but we propose the method
for newly-formed ones. At the
organization's founding it is easy to negotiate. It symbolizes the accepted relationships of legitimate power in
an international body better than current methods do, thus giving a decision
more legitimacy.
The authors would like to thank Bruce Russett,
Hana Shemesh and Benjamin Weiss for their help and suggestions, and Gideon
Schwartz for naming the method. We are
grateful to William Thomson of the University of Rochester, and Robert Aumann
of the Hebrew University, who passed the method on to us as one of interest and
relevance. Barry O'Neill would like to
thank the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University for its support and
inspiring atmosphere.
Since
the end of the Cold War, nations have set up more intergovernmental
organizations and entrusted them with more tasks. There are hundreds of institutions whose members are national
governments, that monitor trade regimes and treaties, establish standards of
measurement, conduct military actions, and perform other activities. However, their increased importance has led
to disputes over their voting rules.
The arguments have shown a recurring pattern, with rich states demanding
more power because of their greater financial support, and poor states arguing
for sovereign equality.
Intergovernmental organizations have used special voting methods to
accommodate the rights of large and small; typically these are weighted voting
schemes where the share of votes given to a small nation is out of proportion
to its size but less than a large state's share.
This
paper advocates a different method, drawn from the responsa of the leader of a
17th century Moravian community. We
call it voting by count and account. As will be discussed, the situation that
prompted its use there is similar to that nations face now.
Voting by count and
account is defined as follows: when a vote is taken, two tallies are made. The first is simply the number of
supporters, and the second is the sum of their weights. A country's "weight" is some pre‑agreed‑upon
objective quantity, most likely its financial contribution or “account,” but
possibly its population or its degree of use of the organization's
resources. A motion passes only if it
attains a majority by both count and
account.
The
first section discusses the conflict between the rights of large and small
states in intergovernmental organizations.
The next section discusses the rule of count-and-account and shows its advantages. It is then compared with other current
methods that are meant to set a compromise between the rights of the two
groups. A first advantage is that it is
easy to negotiate; a second is that it avoids many of the unintended
consequences of other methods, which, in spite of their purpose, sometimes may
increase the inequity. The third
advantage is its appropriate symbolism.
Like other voting methods it makes a symbolic statement about the
legitimate social order of the intergovernmental organization, but unlike other
methods its symbolism is correct. The
proper symbolism makes a decision more legitimate in the minds of those who
will carry it out.
1.
Large versus small in international bodies
Egalitarianism and power come into conflict in
all types of political interactions ‑‑ in setting up a municipal
council or combining provinces into a federal system ‑‑ but
international bodies face it most severely.
There are 50,000 citizens of India to one Palaun, but in the United
Nations each country has one vote.
Japan contributes 20,000 times as much to the regular UN budget as
Cambodia, but each has one vote. This
is unfair, but it would be unfair to deprive Cambodia of a significant voice
because of its poverty. Disparities of
wealth and population across countries are so great that if the larger or
richer countries had voting weights in proportion, the small countries would
have miniscule influence. The large
countries could impose their way by vote, violating the principle of
sovereignty. Big powers will inevitably
apply pressure behind the scenes, but a world body needs fairness in its formal
procedures. Realpolitik assertions that large states should simply take control
of world affairs are in fact unrealistic.
The small countries may be seen as negligible individually but they are
considerable as a group, and in any case their participation is necessary for
the organization's legitimacy.
The conflict of
equality and power should not be seen as one of principle versus coercion,
since the claims of the rich nations can also be grounded in fairness. They should expect more say in the
activities that they are funding. Also,
those states with larger populations are more affected by a typical
international decision, simply because they have more people experiencing the
consequences. There are also practical
reasons for giving the larger states greater voting power, since otherwise they
may reduce their participation or use their influence behind the scenes to try
to undo the group's formal decisions.
An organization's official decisions cannot depart too far from the
underlying power relationships.
Disputes of large
versus small often occur at the founding of the organization, one case being
the International Fund for Agricultural Development, which saw obstructive
debates about weighted versus unweighted voting (Zamora, 1980). Controversies also arise in functioning
organizations. Concerning the United
Nations, in 1985 the US Congress passed the Kassebaum Amendment, by which the
United States would lower its contribution by one fifth unless the UN adopted
weighted voting for budgetary matters.[1] Since then, the conflict over control of the
UN budget has steadily expanded and harmed the organization's effectiveness,
especially in regard to peacekeeping.
Voting issues also arise when new members are admitted to an
international body: the small‑versus‑large tension has been central
in the debate over expanding the European Union.
2.
Voting by count and account
Voting by count and account takes into
consideration both size and equality and does so in a simple way. Votes are counted twice, first with each
party weighted equally, and then with each weighted by its financial
contribution or some other objective measure.
A proposal passes if it gets a majority in both ways. The rule formalizes the idea that an
organization should act only when it has the support of both the general
membership and the important members.
The method came to our
attention through a legal decision rendered in a 17th Moravian community. In 1635 Rabbi Menahem Mendel Krochmal moved
from Krakow to Kremsier to take up his post, and the congregation brought a
dispute to him for his judgement. In an
election for a shamash, a position much like a church sexton, forty of
the forty‑five members had voted for one candidate, but the five in
opposition comprised a rich man, his two sons and two sons‑in‑law,
and together they contributed 60% of the tithes. By a longstanding rule in the community, a candidate needed a majority
of both people and money. The
supporters wanted Rabbi Krochmal to set this rule aside as unfair and
unworkable. Rabbi Krochmal upheld it,
however, on the grounds that it was established custom, and also because it had
a basis in justice, since those who would pay more for a post deserved a
greater say.[2]
Rabbi Krochmal argued
for the method on grounds of justice, that the majority deserved influence but
so did those who will pay for the shamash.
He referred the method as deciding by a majority of minyan and a majority of binyan,
of numbers and of structure. His
phrasing drew on a certain analogy: as used in the Talmud, the words relate to
the issue of when incomplete human remains legally constitute a person's body. Is it sufficient to have just a numerical
majority of the bones, the minyan? Or
does it matter that the main parts of the structure, the skull, backbone and
hips, etc., which form the binyan, be found?
In the community of Kremsier the general membership provided the numbers
and the rich members provided the structure.
A number of double‑criterion
rules are in use, but it is important to distinguish them from
count-and-account. Swiss referenda
require a majority of population and a majority of cantons.[3] Many countries use a system of two
legislative houses ‑‑ a typical bill in the US Congress requires a
majority of both the Senate, where states have equal representation, and the
House of Representatives, where the delegation increases with the state's
population. Other voting rules add a
quorum‑like requirement: to change property taxes in the state of Oregon,
50% of the voters must turn out and 50% of these must support the
proposal. These methods seem like the
one advocated here, but they are not the same.
They do not have the feature that each member votes only once and that
vote is counted twice, unweighted and weighted. The Swiss referendum counts the choices of the voters, but then
counts where the cantons stand on the issue, although the cantons do not
literally vote. The typical bicameral
system is also different, since a US Senator and a member of the House from the
same state can vote in opposite ways. A
bicameral system would make no sense internationally since the delegates would
have the same instructions from their capitols and would vote identically in
the two houses. For the
intergovernmental context, the reasonable analogue of two houses is
count-and-account.
3.
Advantages of international voting by count-and-account
The argument for using count-and-account internationally
involves three considerations.
Ease
of negotiation
Its first advantage is its ease of
negotiation. At an organization's
founding parties must decide on the rules, and the 50% criterion is especially
prominent. It would be hard for some
critic to come up with a counterproposal that is really persuasive, such as
increasing or decreasing the majority.
Since the 50% rule is most natural, that proposal is less likely to lead
to haggling.[4]
A few voting bodies
have used systems that are like count-and-account, but, oddly, none seems to
have set the quota at 50%. In the OPEC
Special Fund, which was founded in 1976 to finance development in non‑oil‑producing
countries, support for a motion must include at least 2/3 of the members who
represent at least 70% of the contributions to the Fund (Zamora, 1980). The 1982 formula for amending the Canadian
Constitution required "resolutions of the legislative assemblies of at
least two‑thirds of the provinces that have, in the aggregate, according
to the then latest general census, at least fifty percent of the population of
all the provinces" (Kilgour and Lebesque, 1984). The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer
set goals for decreased production and consumption of controlled substances. The goals to be achieved by 1998 were
amendable by a two‑thirds majority of the voting parties, representing
two‑thirds of the total consumption.
In the Global Environmental Facility, an agency of the World Bank
founded in 1993, a motion must be approved by at least 60% of the countries
representing 60% of the contributions.[5] In the Council of Ministers of the European
Community, countries are assigned voting weights from 2 votes up till 10,
roughly on the basis of their size, and certain motions, those that were not
proposed by the Commission, require approval by 10 countries out of 15, with a
combined voting weight of 62 out of the total 87 (Hosli, 1996).[6]
These methods are like count‑and‑account except for their
higher majority quotients. The history
and background of these groups suggest that the designers wished to build in
inertia for certain kinds of motions that changed the status quo, so they
included the double majority criterion and raised the majority quotient above
50% as well. Our view, however, is that
the double 50% rule has a much broader use – it is appropriate for the regular
work of the organization, in place of the a simple majority by count. One might worry that adding a second majority
would make motions harder to pass and hamper the group, but our studies
indicate that the rule is only slightly more conservative than the regular
simple majority unless the organization is significantly polarized between
large and small. (This issue will be
discussed shortly.)
The
argument about negotiability of the 50% rules is somewhat circular, since it is
based partly on its innate salience but also on precedent. The more groups that are using it, the more
acceptable it will become for further adoption.
The purpose of count-and-account is to require
assent both from the masses as well as those countries that supply the
resources. It is clear that it
implements this goal and it is clear how it implements it. Other rules that address the problem seem
simple enough but they conceal unacceptable flaws; as will be shown below, some
may actually diminish the power of the small countries they mean to help. However, this phenomenon cannot arise in
voting by count and account. According
to a reasonable measure of voting power, the rule always distributes power
among the members more equitably than a voting rule based purely on weight
(e.g., based on financial contribution.)[7]
The most common way that international organizations have tried to reconcile the claims of small and large states, is by assigning assign weights to countries and declaring a motion passed if its supporters have a majority of the total weight. The weights increase with some quantity like size or financial contribution to give large members more power, but they are not in strict proportion to the quantity. Small countries get more than their share. In the European Community Council of Ministers, for example, 10 votes are given to the UK, Germany, France and Italy, 2 to Luxembourg, and the rest of the fifteen lie in between. The votes increase roughly with population, but not in proportion or Luxembourg would get near zero.
In the Council of
Ministers voting weights are assigned more or less by negotiation, case by
case, but other bodies set the weights by rules. The most common system internationally is that of basic votes. The total weight is divided into two
portions, part being divided equally among the members and the other assigned
in proportion to size. As a consequence
the small members receive less than average weight, but more than a share based
on size alone.
The system of basic
votes is especially common in two kinds of international organizations: those
for commodity regulation, like the International Sugar Council and the International
Jute Council, and international banks and development funds, like the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Inter‑American
Development Bank. In the commodity
organizations, the total votes are often divided equally between exporters and
importers, for example, 1000 votes to each group with 100 votes distributed
equally within a group, where passing a motion requires a simple or two‑thirds
majority from both groups.
One difficulty with
basic votes is the arbitrariness in deciding what proportion to set aside for
equal division. This issue must be
negotiated at an organization's founding and can stall an agreement. Large states will want few votes to be basic
and small states want more. Unless the
group is willing to divide the votes 50/50, i.e., basic votes equal to
proportional votes, there is no prominent split that makes for a natural
agreement. A basic vote proportion of
50% is more generous than the large states have been so far, and typically the
share has been set so low that the small states get negligible benefit. This consequence is most striking in
organizations that give a fixed number of basic votes to each member and divide
the rest by the nominal dollar values of the members' contributions (in
contrast to rules that keep the basic votes at a fixed fraction of the total
votes.) If the total contributions to
the organization go up, then the proportion of basic votes will fall. In some groups the basic votes have drifted
down to insignificance due to inflation, the growth of the organization or of
the world economy. In the IMF, for one,
the basic vote proportion started at 11.15%, and increased early on as more
countries joined. However inflation and
economic growth overwhelmed this trend, and the basic votes are now about 2% of
the total and gives no more than a nod to equality. The history of the Inter‑American Development Bank (IDB) is
even more extreme, starting at 3%, and falling to .07%. Some international banks have a significant
proportion of basic votes, like the African Development Bank, at 45%, but these
are typically ones with no predominant wealthy members. They have tended to be less effective in
promoting development, precisely because they lacked large and rich
contributors.
A second difficulty of
basic votes is a fundamental conceptual one ‑‑ they sometimes do
not accomplish what they are supposed to.
They can give a small country more voting weight but less power. In order to show this, it is first important
to distinguish voting weight from power.
These concepts are often treated as synonymous but are not ‑‑
a member's real power can be different than its weight. Consider a three‑member committee with
weights 1, 3, and 3, where a motion needs a simple majority of 4 out of 7 to
pass. It is easy to see that each
member has equal power since any two are necessary to win, so the larger two
voters should not feel that their larger weights give them more power. Suppose, however, that the majority quota is
raised to 5 out of 7. Then the power of
the 1‑vote player disappears ‑‑ there is no configuration of
support where it can make a difference.
The example shows that voting power depends on more than one's own
weight, that it is also influenced by the weights of the other members and by
the majority quota.
Because of the
distinction between voting weight and voting power, introducing basic votes can
sometimes decrease the power of the smaller players. Consider an organization of five members where their accounts are
in the proportions 3: 4: 4: 4: 10. When
100 votes are divided by the accounts, the members receive the following
weights:
(1) 100 votes
allocated proportional to account: 12, 16, 16, 16, 40.
Now introduce a system of basic votes, where 25
votes are divided equally and the remaining 75 are allocated in proportion to
account. Simple arithmetic gives the
following weights:
(2) 25 votes shared
equally and 75 by account: 14, 17, 17, 17, 35.
(For example, the largest member gets 5 of the
basic votes plus 10/25 of the 75 proportional votes, or 35 votes in all.)[8]
Here introducing basic votes wipes
out the power of the small voter.
Assuming that 51 votes are needed to pass, in the original arrangement
(1) the small voter had some power. It
could combine with the 40‑vote member, or with all three 16‑vote
members to make a majority. In (2),
however, the small voter has no power.
Power means making a difference, and there is no group the small voter
can join and change a loss into a win.
It can no longer put the large voter over the top, since the latter has
become weaker, and the middle three voters now have more weight and can produce
a majority without the small one. Power
here is different from weight since it depends on the details of possible
alliances, and basic votes have removed those possibilities for the small
state.
Of course, some
members might abstain on a motion and this event would give the smallest state
a role again. Abstentions often occur
on issues that are less significant, or sometimes they are devices to avoid
committing oneself on an important issue.
However, the small states would probably not find it appealing that the
method gives them power only in situations when others do not want to vote.
This example is
constructed to show that basic votes may fail to achieve their goal. This result is only a possibility, and such
examples become quite unlikely when the group is large, since large groups
allow so many configurations of support and opposition that there is usually
some way a small player can make a difference. [9] However, the example should be a warning
that the relationship between voting power and weight is subtle. Even if introducing basic votes does not rob
a small player of all power, it may do less or more than was intended.
This phenomenon cannot
happen under voting by count and account.
According to a theorem of Peleg (1991), the method always distributes
power at least as equally or more so than voting purely by account. (Peleg also showed the “dual” result, that
it is at least as favorable to the large states as voting purely by
count.)
A more general method
of guaranteeing a voice to the smaller nations is to introduce a voting floor,
where a country, however small, receives some minimum voting weight. In the EC Council of Ministers, for example,
Luxembourg receives two votes, although a proportional rule would put it at
almost zero.
Voting floors can be
accused of arbitrariness in setting the minimum level of votes. Also, as with basic votes, adding a floor
can have unexpected consequences for power -- in particular, it may sometimes
help the largest member. Although one
can expect that a floor will help those who are raised to the floor, their
added power can come from those just above their size, even though the latters'
votes have not changed. To illustrate
this possibility, consider a body of four voters with weights 1, 2, 2, and 6,
which as usual, we assume are determined by their size or account. Assuming a majority quota of 2/3, a motion
passes if it gets 8 votes. Note that
the smallest voter has no power. If we
now set a floor of 2 votes then the weights become 2, 2, 2, and 6, and the two‑thirds
majority quota stays at 8. The smallest
member can now make a significant alliance, but with more 2‑vote members
available, it is easier for the 6‑vote member to find an ally. Equivalently, there is stiffer competition
among the two original 2‑vote members to be the ally of the large voter,
so they are less able to demand a lot for their support.[10] Adding the floor increases the power of the
6‑vote member and reduces the power of the two existing 2‑vote
members. The original 1‑vote
player does indeed acquire some power, but it comes from the middle states,
with the large voter actually gaining power from them as well. Here the floor system helps the poor and the
rich by taxing the semi‑poor.
Examples like these cannot be generated for count-and-account.
A final grounds for using the method is less
precise but probably more important: voting by count and account embodies the
correct symbolism for the public decisions of an international
organization. Accordingly it gives a
vote more legitimacy.
One type of symbolism
is based on analogy (described as “focal symbolism,” O'Neill, 1999). The symbol and the larger idea being
symbolized have a similar structure, onlookers note the similarity, they know
that others are noticing it, and they form mutual expectations about how they
will act on the important matter being symbolized. The Berlin Wall, for example, became a prominent symbol for the
Western nations during the Cold War. It
was seen as dividing East and West Berlin, imprisoning those behind it,
analogous to communism's division of Europe into free and oppressed peoples. Recognition of this in the West increased
expectations of an anti‑communist stance. In another example, Handelman (1990) describes the symbolism of
Israel's memorial day at the Western Wall.
The participants include the nation's president, the chief rabbi of the
Israel Defense Forces, soldiers, members of bereaved families, and others. Further symbolic elements involve the flame
to represent the war dead, the flag standing for the modern state, and the
Western Wall to recall the tradition of the Jewish people. The ceremony has these elements interact in
a way that that models the proper relationships among the represented groups
and ideas. It reaffirms those
relationships, and makes the audience more aware of the basis of their social
bond, and as a public event, more confident that the rest are aware of it.
When an important
deliberative body takes a public vote, it has an opportunity to assert its
structure and ideals, to reinforce the general order of the group. The body also gives legitimacy to the
particular decision being voted for, by reminding the group that the decision
is being taken according to the accepted structure. One example is the bicameral system of the United States where
the vote in the Senate, in which states are represented equally, expresses the
equality of their rights in the federal system. At the founding of the International Monetary Fund, a motive for
including a small number of basic votes rather than assigning voting weights
strictly by financial contribution, was symbolism, according to Gold (1981), to
avoid having the Fund look like a corporation with stockholders.
The voting rules of
the United Nations Security Council show attention to this symbolism of
analogy. A motion requires a majority
of 9 of 15 members that includes all the Big Five permanent members. Several authors have noted that the system
can be restated as based on voting weights and a supermajority. If the Big Five had seven votes each and the
other ten states had one vote each and if the majority were 39 out of the total
45 votes, then the same motions would pass and the same would fail. These are two equivalent ways of describing
what is, in the abstract, the same voting rule. Symbolically, however, they are different. The first way of putting it, the qualified
majority, is the prevalent and officially accepted one. It symbolically states that both the small
and especially large states must concur in a Security Council action. The alternative way of stating the rule
seems to suggest that some nations are several times as important as others, and
the key is to get a sufficient weight of support behind a proposal. This formulation is politically
unacceptable. Nor is another popular
way of putting the rule, that each of the Big Five has a "veto,"
since this suggests that there are two groups, the small states and the large
states, and the latter are given the right to frustrate the former's
wishes. The difference may be
semantics, but calling the Security Council a "veto" system is not a
wording that would appear in the most official United Nations documents, since
it makes an inappropriate suggestion about the power and dynamics of the UN
system.
Any weighted voting
scheme is symbolically inappropriate for an international assembly. It suggests that the nations have different
importances according to their voting weights.
It fails to recognize the principle that all nations are equal in one
important sense, sovereignty. Voting by
count and account, however, includes the latter principle, since one of the two
tallies treats all nations alike.
Another aspect of
symbolism is important for international voting rules ‑‑ the
meaning of the rules within the body.
There are two broad classes of international organizations (Zamora,
1980). Some make mostly declarations of
principle and advisory pronouncements, usually to establish or reinforce
international norms, while others make decisions that are directly
implemented. The former usually
function by one country/one vote, while the latter tend to have voting rules
that consider size. In the latter, the
voting system is often present but in the background, and decisions are made by
the "sense of the group," sometimes called consensus. However it is understood that this does not
mean unanimity nor it does not mean equality of influence. The group forms expectations of whose
support is important for various decisions, and they do so largely on the
formal voting rules. The voting rules
symbolize the power and expected role in decision-making of the different members,
even though they are almost never used.
This argument, then,
says that voting rules are symbolically important even when votes are
rare. In this case, voting by count and
account gives more appropriate symbolism of the power relation in
organizations. It suggests that
countries have two sources of importance ‑‑ their contribution and
their sovereign equal status as states.
These two are incommensurable, so they should not be lumped together as
a single weight.
4.
Is count-and-account too conservative?
Voting by count and account is necessarily more
conservative than using a straight majority or the account weights alone, since
two criteria have to be satisfied rather than one and fewer resolutions get
passed. This can be seen either as a
disadvantage of the method – it might block a useful action – or as appropriate
– it might stop the assembly from trying to implement measures that crucial
parties oppose. The question is: How
much would it reduce the proportion of motions passed?
To estimate
the decrease, one can look introduce count-and-account hypothetically in some
international bodies. The results will
depend on what kinds of motions come before the body, and a plausible model is this:
each motion that comes up has a certain "popularity" p, which is some
number randomly and uniformly selected between zero and one; each member votes
for the motion with a probability equal to its popularity, and given the
popularity p, members’ votes are otherwise independent of each other. A computer simulation repeatedly can bring
forward imaginary motions and determine the proportion that would get through
under a given voting system.15
The Inter‑American Development
Bank has forty-six members with votes weighted almost entirely by their
contributions. The weights range from a
few thousand up to about 2.3 million votes for the United States. Under a simple weighted majority, about half
the motions pass; under count-and-account, about 42% pass. The decrease is slight. An example with even more inequality was
COMECON, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance of the former socialist
bloc. In 1969 the contribution of the
Soviet Union dominated, at 64.3% of the fund, the next largest being Poland at
8.3%. Formal voting was evidently by
one nation/one vote (Szawlowski, 1976), however. If one were to hypothetically add the majority-of-account
requirement, the rate of motions passing would decrease from 45% to 36%.16 Thus, count-and-account tends to be more
conservative when the weights have greater variance, but even in an extreme
case it does not paralyze the organization.
In this model voting
is determined by the motion’s popularity, and there is no systematic opposition
between large and small voters. To look
at the latter case, one can use the votes recorded in the United Nations General
Assembly from 1945 to 1996. We divide
the period into five approximate decades, and use the list of about 4300 roll
calls from Gartzke, Jo and Tucker (1999) and the financial contributions of
each member for each decade, to determine what proportion of the votes would
get through under the actual system of majority rule and under
count-and-account.
Period |
Proportion of motions passed by
majority |
Proportion of motions passed by C&A |
Difference |
1945 - 1955 |
.775 |
.671 |
.104 |
1956 - 1965 |
.907 |
.777 |
.130 |
1966 - 1975 |
.853 |
.578 |
.275 |
1976 - 1985 |
.997 |
.672 |
.325 |
1986 - 1996 |
.962 |
.576 |
.386 |
Table 1.
Proportion of motions passing the General Assembly in fact (simple majority)
and using count-and-account.
The table shows a
systematic trend, a uniformly growing difference from adding the criterion of a
majority of account. At the beginning
changing the rule would have made little difference, only about 10% fewer would
have passed, but by the 1986-1996 period the small and large nations were at
odds and about 40% fewer would have passed.
The decrease would not necessarily have been bad, since if these
resolutions are to be more than declarations, they need wide support. Also, the United Nations might have avoided
its financial crisis, if the United States had not felt spited by the General
Assembly majority.
These numbers have to
be taken with a qualification: if the voting system had been different,
different resolutions would have been introduced. Also we are not suggesting that the General Assembly switch to
this method – whatever its merits, a change would be politically very
difficult. The emphasis should be on
incorporating it in newly-formed bodies
In summary, the following general statements seem to
hold. For an unpolarized voting body,
introducing count-and-account does not drastically reduce the rate of passing
motions. The reduction is greater when
contributions across members are very unequal, and it is especially great when
large members are set against the small.
However, if fewer motions pass in the latter case represents, the method
is doing what it is supposed to do.
5.
Conclusion
For decision‑making within a democratic
state, a tried method is a two‑house system. Voting by count and account is its analogue for intergovernmental
organizations. It tends to equalize
power compared to straight voting by account, but still gives larger states
appropriately greater power. Compared
to current systems of voting by assigned weights, it is less arbitrary, easier
to agree on, and avoids certain perverse consequences where an attractive‑seeming
set of voting weights leads to greater inequality. Also it projects the correct symbolism, both within the voting
body and to the world.
It is curious that a
voting scheme retrieved from the 17th century would have international uses
today, but some aspects of Rabbi Krochmal's context suggest that this is more
than coincidental. In a modern urban
community if someone feels that their city council is trampling on their rights
they can appeal to the court system.
However, Rabbi Krochmal's community had to find a way to avoid
this. If a discontented party resorted
to the higher authority, namely the state, it would cause a bitter division and
threaten the community's autonomy. A
decision method was needed that would select a compromise between the elements
and avoid higher appeals.[11] The international system is like Rabbi
Krochmal's community, since there is no higher authority. One needs a method where the group acts only
when there is wide agreement.
References
Salo Baron. Membership and Elections. Ch. 10 in The Jewish Community, Its History and
Structure to the American Revolution. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society of America. 1942.
Erik Gartzke, Dong-Joon Jo, and Richard
Tucker. 1999. “UN General Assembly
Voting, 1946-1996.” Version 2.0, at
website http://www.vanderbilt.edu/~rtucker/data/affinity/un/assembly
Joseph Gold. The Origins of Weighted Voting in
the Fund. Finance and Development.
18, 25‑28, 1981.
Donald Handelman. Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1990.
Madeleine Hosli. Coalitions and Power: Effects
of Qualified Majority Voting in the Council of the European Union. Journal of Common Market Studies. 34,
255‑273, 1996.
Marc Kilgour and Terence Levesque. The Canadian
Constitutional Amending Formula: Bargaining in the Past and the Future. Public Choice. 44, 457‑480, 1984.
Menahem Mendel Krochmal. Semeh Sedek. Amsterdam, 1675.
Barry O'Neill.
Honor, Symbols and War. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1999.
Bezalel Peleg. Voting by Count and Account. Pp.
45‑51 in Reinhard Selten, ed. Rational
Interaction. Berlin: Springer‑Verlag. 1991.
William Riker and Lloyd Shapley. Weighted
Voting: A Mathematical Analysis for Instrumental Judgements. Nomos. 9, 1966.
Richard Szawlowski. The System of the
International Organizations of the Communist Countries. Leyden: Sijthoff.
1975
Stephen Zamora. Voting in International Economic
Organizations. American Journal of
International Law. 74, 566‑608, 1980.
[1]
The
amendment put the discontents of the Congress succinctly, reading in part (Foreign Relations Authorization Act,
Fiscal Years 1986 and 1987, Section 143, p. 21):
(a) Findings ‑ The Congress finds that the
United Nations and its specialized agencies which are financed through assessed
contributions of member states have not paid sufficient attention in the
development of their budgets to the views of member governments who are major
financial contributors to these budgets.
(b) Voting Rights ‑‑ In order to foster greater financial responsibility in preparation of the budgets of the United Nations and its specialized agencies which are financed through assessed contributions, the Secretary of State shall seek the adoption by the United Nations and its specialized agencies of procedures which grant voting rights to each member state on matters of budgetary consequence. Such voting rights shall be proportionate to the contribution of each such member state to the budget of the United Nations and its specialized agencies.
[2] Consistent with his reputation as a defender of the poor, Rabbi Krochmal found a way around the rule in the particular case. The fund that paid the salary of the shamash came in part from a per‑person contribution, and the masses of the congregation had given a greater amount to the source of the salary than their usual proportion. Based on his calculations, which he included in his written judgement, their candidate had the support of most of the people and most of the money, and could be installed. A further responsa in the volume (#84) clarifies his thinking ‑‑ he supported a voice for the poor on the grounds that even though their contribution was small, they made a greater sacrifice in rendering it.
[3] A similar system has been in use in Australia since the last century where a proposal must get a majority of the whole population, plus win a majority in a majority of the states. A version in which specified constituencies must give their support has been introduced in Canada to increase minority representation.
[4] There is nothing unworkable about a rule that raises one or both majority quotas above 50%, or, if one quota is at 50% or more, that sets the other at a lower value. However if both are below 50%, problems arise since two opposing factions might both be winning.
[5] This procedure adds a complication in that countries group together into constituencies to put members on the Council, and a Council member can then cast the total voting weight of its group.
[6] One
proposal for voting by count and account is for the European Council of
Ministers, a 1994 document from Germany’s Christian Democratic Party suggesting
its use based on count of countries and by size of population. France opposed the plan at the 1997
Intergovernmental Conference ‑‑ Germany and France have equal votes
now and the change would advantage Germany, which is more populous. The episode shows that it is easier to get a
rule adopted in the founding discussion than to change the system in place.
[7] Peleg's result extends to systems in which the majority quota may differ from 50%. He used the Shapley‑Shubik index, which is regarded by many as the best measure of voting power due only by the constitutional rules of the body.
[8] An equivalent definition of basic votes involves moving each voter one quarter of the way from its original set of weights towards equal weights, where here each of the five gets 20 votes.
[9] In most organizations with large memberships, power is more or less proportional to weight, with a slight relative advantage held by the larger players (Riker and Shapley, 1966), unless voting weights are carefully set up to avoid this result.
[10] The Shapley‑Shubik index of voting power reflects this argument. In the original game the players' respective values were 0, .167, .167, and .667; in the game with the floor, they are .083, .083, .083, and .75, indicating that the greater power of the big and small players comes at the expense of the middle ones.
15 This model is not a good description of the surface behaviour of the Council or other body. It suggests that half the motions will fail, but in recent years only about 15 - 20% have failed and in fact only about 20 - 25% have received any negative votes at all (Lane and Mattila, 1998). One should not require a numerical matching, however, since the goal is to fit to the real power relationships, where a motion not be expected to pass would usually not be brought to a vote. Conversely nations see no point in casting a formal negative vote against a motion that they know will pass.
16 Another example of the consequences of adding a second majority comes from the Council of Ministers of the European Union It is real, but not purely the method advocated here, since supermajorities are required for both count and by weight and the weights correspond to no real property. The range of weights is relatively small: Luxembourg has two votes and the four large powers ten votes (Table 1). A motion requires 62 out of 87 votes for passage. Under the model, about 31% of the motions would pass. For motions not arising as proposals from the European Commission, another requirement is necessary -- the support of 10 out of the 15 countries. The system is in effect, count-and-weight with a supermajority. The addition of the "10 of 15" requirement is almost superfluous, since it is very unlikely that a motion will get a total weight of 62 without that. Again about 31% of motions pass -- the decline is negligible.
[11] On issues of setting taxes, conducting elections, or representation on deliberative bodies that perform assessments of wealth, a strong tradition in rabbinical judgements has been to follow whatever rule was in place in the particular community (Baron, 1942). One should not raise arguments from the law to indicate the community has been doing it wrong, or insist on justice grounds that the community must adopt the method used elsewhere. On matters of allocation of resources and power within the community, the prime precept is not to disturb whatever has been working.