Marquis de Condorcet Goes to Eurasia: Making Decisions by Qualified Majority Voting in Supranational Integration Unions

Introduction. The article contrasts the Eurasian Economic Union, an integration union with only five member states, to the European Union, which has twenty-seven member states. The aims of research at presenting the model obtained as a result of a study of the impact of the growth in the number of countries participating in an integration union on the decision-making process in it. It notes that the European Union tends to increase the number of policy areas that allow making decisions by qualified majority voting in the European Council. In the Eurasian Economic Union, qualified majority voting is only allowed in the Collegium of the Eurasian Economic Commission, and even there the number of policy areas that allow qualified majority voting tends to decline.
Methods and material. The article combines the methodological models traditionally used as means of explanation of the Condorcet paradox with those that emerged out of the game theory. The empirical basis of the article consists of documents of the Eurasian Economic Union and the European Union, which allows constructing models of decision-making processes in these two supranational integration unions.
Results. The research model presented in the article allows concluding that enlargement of integration unions also makes outcomes of (qualified majority) voting more dependent on voting procedure in the situation when none of possible voting procedures is ideal. The article demonstrates that the difference in the tendencies of decision-making is caused by the difference in the number of member states: enlargement in terms of the number of member states makes integration unions increase the number of policy areas allowing making decisions by qualified majority voting.
Discussion and Conclusions. The results of the study are paradoxical: on one hand, the more member states an integration union has, the more it tends to increase the number of policy areas allowing decision-making by qualified majority voting. On other hand, the more member states it has, the more outcomes of the qualified majority voting tend to depend on the voting procedure. That paradox justifies introduction of the concept of minilateral integration unions to indicate those such unions that have only few member states. The article concludes that such integration unions require models of analysis that were different from those applied when analyzing integration unions that have multiple member states.