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A priori voting power distribution under contemporary Security Council reform proposals

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Abstract

This paper analyses the distribution of a priori voting power of states and regional groups within the UN Security Council, under the most salient reform proposals of the past decade. The results obtained show that moderate proposals, which do not seek to expand veto rights, generally yield a higher voting power share for non-veto states in the Council (both individually and collectively), at the expense of veto states, but they do not alter the geographical distribution of voting power significantly. By contrast, the more radical proposals, which seek to expand veto rights, yield a more balanced regional representation, but have the adverse effect of concentrating voting power almost entirely in the hands of the small number of states with veto rights, with non-veto states holding cumulatively less than 2 per cent of all voting power shares in the Security Council under the Normalized Banzhaf index and less than 0.01 per cent under the Shapley-Shubik index.

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Notes

  1. For a detailed history of the debates surrounding the Security Council reform before 2008, see von Freiesleben (2013). For an in-depth account of contemporary developments, see Swart (2013).

  2. By ‘proposed’ I do not necessarily mean that the documents have been submitted on the formal agenda of the UNGA or UNSC, but only distributed among its members.

  3. Alongside the 2005 proposal of Kofi Annan, at that time the UN Secretary-General, termed In larger freedom: towards development, security and human rights for all, which was in turn based on a Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.

  4. A somewhat more technical definition is provided by Felsenthal and Machover (2004: 3) as follows: ‘by the a priori voting power of a voter under a given decision rule, we mean, roughly speaking, the amount of potential influence over the possible outcomes of divisions which the voter possesses by virtue of the rule. This last qualification — “by virtue of the rule” — is of vital importance’.

  5. Namely the Normalised Banzhaf index, the Coleman Power to Prevent Action index, the Coleman Power to Initiate Action index and the Shapley-Shubik index.

  6. Which is ‘not reducible to the formalities of decisional rules’ and ‘depends on a complex interaction of real-world factors’ (Felsenthal and Machover 2004: 13).

  7. Through Resolution 1991 of the UN General Assembly, adopted on 17 December, 1963. See: http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/18/ares18.htm (last accessed on 2 May, 2013).

  8. Alongside a requirement of ratification by two thirds of all UN member states.

  9. Various arguments can be constructed, however, in favour of retaining veto rights, not as a political compromise, but as a principled position. Voeten (2007: 296), for instance, uses rational choice institutionalism to show that granting veto rights to states, which have the potential to undermine the decision taken by a committee is a Pareto optimal outcome.

  10. For comprehensive analyses of the 2005 UNSC reform proposals, which also approach these topics, see Blum (2005) and Cox (2009).

  11. With regard to the fourth issue, some proposals have explicit provisions, while others do not. In the latter case, I use a procedure described in the third section in order to estimate the most plausible figure, following current and past practice in the Security Council. My procedure differs from that of Hosli et al. (2011), and while the results are identical for all cases analysed by both papers, in the case of the L69/CARICOM draft proposal, they are slightly different.

  12. Thus, the L69 Draft resolution from 2007, the Liechtenstein Draft resolution from 2010 and the S5 Draft resolution from 2012 are not considered in the present analysis.

  13. Hereafter the In Larger Freedom Report.

  14. Thus, throughout the paper, I refer to the first group as belonging to the category of moderate proposals and the second one as belonging to the category of radical proposals, thereby reflecting the extent of their departure from the status quo.

  15. http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N05/270/78/PDF/N0527078.pdf?OpenElement (last accessed on 4 May, 2013).

  16. The most recent significant proposal before this was the Razali plan, introduced on 20 March, 1997, which was never subjected to vote. See https://www.globalpolicy.org/security-council/security-council-as-an-institution/41310-razali-reform-paper.html (last accessed on 4 June, 2013).

  17. The report contained no less than 222 paragraphs, out of which only 4 (from 167 to 170) targeted specifically the reconfiguration of the Security Council.

  18. Equitably distributed among the four regional groups.

  19. http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N05/270/78/PDF/N0527078.pdf?OpenElement Article 169 (a), p. 42 (last accessed on 4 May, 2013).

  20. http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/N05/410/80/PDF/N0541080.pdf?OpenElement (last accessed on 4 May, 2013).

  21. http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/N05/434/76/PDF/N0543476.pdf?OpenElement (last accessed on 5 May, 2013).

  22. That is, wider than in the case of the G4 proposal.

  23. http://www.safpi.org/sites/default/files/publications/au_executive_council_ezulwini_consensus.pdf (last accessed on 6 May, 2013).

  24. http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/N05/421/67/PDF/N0542167.pdf?OpenElement (last accessed on 6 May, 2014).

  25. http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/N07/506/04/PDF/N0750604.pdf?OpenElement (last accessed on 23 December, 2014).

  26. The draft resolution itself was ultimately not subjected to vote in the General Assembly; see von Freiesleben (2013: 15–16) for an account of the circumstances surrounding the withdrawal.

  27. From Africa, Latin-America and the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific.

  28. The largest expansion of the Security Council proposed to this day.

  29. Out of the five, the Ezulwini Consensus and the L69/CARICOM proposals are the only ones that do not make any references to the importance of contributions to the UN, but rather emphasise the paramount importance of effective regional representation in the first case, and a more equitable representation of developing states in the second case.

  30. In 2011, the Asia group changed its name to the Asia-Pacific group, in response to states in the Pacific who were previously a part of the group as well. For the full list of regional group membership, see http://www.un.int/wcm/webdav/site/gmun/shared/documents/GA_regionalgrps_Web.pdf (last accessed on 6 June, 2013).

  31. This method is used implicitly in most papers on voting power in the Security Council (for instance, Schwodiauer 1968: 4) and made explicit in others (for instance, Miroiu 2007: 90). The system of linear equations is designed to capture the lowest number required for a decision to pass under the weighted voting system (first equation) and the highest number for which a decision cannot pass (second equation).

  32. I will not include the detailed calculations for the five reform proposals in the paper. Since the mathematical apparatus is extremely simple, the reader can easily verify their correctness.

  33. Hosli et al. (2011: 176) use an alternative procedure, of choosing the quota closest to 60 per cent of the total number of members. Since there is no officially mandated Security Council procedure, the historical pattern of majority requirements in the Council can be legitimately interpreted in both ways, but as the number of members increases, the two estimations will yield increasingly divergent results. In this case, estimations made on the Secretary-General Report and the Ezulwini Consensus yield identical results, but estimations made on the L69/CARICOM proposal using the Hosli et al. (2011) method would yield a quota of 16, instead of 15. The results, however, do not differ significantly between the two quotas.

  34. The main reason why I use these particular four indices, instead of other more recently developed ones (for instance, Deegan and Packel 1978; Johnston 1978; Holler 1982; Hoede and Bakker 1982) is that they are the the most well-known and widely used indices in the literature on voting power and, at the same time, they embody the two major directions of development, that is the I-power (power as influence) approach and the P-power (power as prize) approach (Felsenthal and Machover 1998). For critiques of some of these indices or the whole a priori voting power approach itself, see Garrett and Tsebelis (1999), Felsenthal and Machover (2002), Albert (2003), Gelman et al. (2004) or Kaniovski (2008).

  35. See Leech (2002a: 6–10) for the formal framework.

  36. Namely, a coalition composed of all players, ordered in a specific sequence.

  37. The indices were computed through the ipgenf and ssgenf programs developed by Dennis Leech and Robert Leech.

  38. A major difference between the results described here and those of Hosli et al. (2011: 179–80) concerns the Uniting for Consensus and the G4 proposals, under the Normalised Banzhaf index (this is the only comparable index between our studies). While here the index yields different values, in Hosli et al. (2011) the Uniting for Consensus and the G4 proposals yield exactly the same results for the Banzhaf index. Since the index used and all other conditions are identical, what is the source of this divergence between studies? The problem lies with the fact that Hosli et al. (2011) have failed to take into account the explicit specifications of the Uniting for Consensus and the G4 proposals regarding the majority quota required for decision making. Thus, they simply apply the procedure of approximating the closest value to 60 per cent of the total number of votes, as mentioned in a previous endnote, in order to obtain the quota. While this is consistent with the actual majority requirement in the Uniting for Consensus proposal, the G4 proposal states explicitly that the Charter will be amended so as to ‘require the affirmative vote of 14 of 25 members of the Security Council for a decision’, which is lower than the 15 member quota used by Hosli et al. (2011).

  39. The percentages are relative to the highest values which the indices can take, namely 1, and are not calculated as a percentage of the shift from the status quo.

  40. The impact for both proposals is identical in these respects for the first five digits after the decimal point.

  41. To a total value of 98.48 and 98.99 per cent, respectively.

  42. If we take into account the fact that even veto states do not exceed the value of 3 per cent in either the status quo or the reform proposals, we notice that the 0.02 per cent increase is not a very small value.

  43. But with a higher intensity.

  44. Which cannot be altered as long as veto rights remain in place.

  45. For all indices except Shapley-Shubik.

  46. At the same time, it shows that Hosli et al.’s (2011) neglection of the G4 proposed majority quota is highly relevant to the results.

  47. With the L69/CARICOM proposal being slightly more radical than the Ezulwini Consensus in all cases.

  48. While we cite only from the Ezulwini Consensus, the same clauses (with minor stylistic adjustments) are also present in the L69 and the CARICOM proposals.

  49. http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/N05/421/67/PDF/N0542167.pdf?OpenElement (last accessed on 28 April, 2013).

  50. At the time when this article was written.

  51. For instance, neither of the four salient definitions of Pitkin (1967) do not seem to overlap with the term representation, as used in the proposals described in the second section, although the descriptive definition of representation appears to resemble it to some extent.

  52. See for example the In Larger Freedom Report (p. 43) which seeks to replace the five regional groups currently in existence with four, by replacing the Eastern Europe, Western Europe and Others and Latin-America and the Caribbean groups with Europe and Americas, or the L69/CARICOM proposal which adds a new group for developing states.

  53. An alternative course of action would have been to consider that the regional groups vote en bloc, namely that all states vote the same way all the time. Such an analysis yields interesting results as well, with the African and the Latin-American and Caribbean groups shown to have 0 voting power under all indices for both the status quo and any reform proposal except for the Ezulwini Consensus and the L69/CARICOM proposal, where they would have voting power equal to all other regional groups. The assumption of bloc voting, however, is severely restrictive and unreflective of reality; therefore, I will not adopt it here. Using cumulative voting power shares requires no such unrealistic assumption as that of unitary bloc voting.

  54. This is a natural consequence of the fact that veto rights weigh much more under the Shapley-Shubik index than under the Banzhaf index. When we have no states with veto rights in a group, the Shapley-Shubik index tends to grant it a lot less power than the Banzhaf index and, conversely, when there are a lot of veto states in a group, the Shapley-Shubik index estimates its voting power at a much higher level than the Banzhaf index.

  55. Under the G4 proposal and the Uniting for Consensus proposal, Eastern Europe would also have a slightly lower voting share, of approximately 1–2 per cent.

  56. A new group, the Small islands and developing states, was also introduced in the L69/CARICOM proposal, which would hold 0.06 per cent of the voting power under the Banzhaf index and 0.0002 per cent under the Shapley-Shubik index.

  57. Excepting the group created for developing states under the L69/CARICOM proposal.

  58. The difference in the present configuration of the Security Council being of 50.07 per cent for the Banzhaf index and 58.86 per cent for the Shapley-Shubik index.

  59. I also include the G4 proposal in this category, since their proposal simply called for a reopening of the discussion on the matter at a later time in the future.

  60. With the former being lighter still than the latter.

  61. See, for instance, the Eastern Europe group, which, on the one hand, includes the Russian Federation and, on the other hand, many states which are currently much more closely aligned to the positions of the Western Europe and Others group.

  62. De Mesquita and Smith (2010) argue, however, that the aid increases have a detrimental effect on the welfare of citizens in recipient states, both from an economic standpoint and from the perspective of civil liberties in non-democratic regimes.

  63. This is, in fact, one of the most controversial issues between the proposals, representing the main difference between Plan A and Plan B in the Secretary-General Report and one of the main differences between the G4 proposal and the Uniting for Consensus proposal.

  64. The proposal of the In Larger Freedom Report would not fare much better though, since it would, for instance, insert the Russian Federation in the Europe group, appearing to give it, as a regional group, more power than it would actually hold.

  65. As iterated before already, this is the primary reason why the Uniting for Consensus group yielded a more equitable distribution of voting power than the G4 proposal and the Secretary-General Report.

  66. Subject to constraints of efficiency and seeking to avoid objections from current P5 members for reasons concerned with political acceptability.

  67. This only applies to the draft resolutions.

  68. Although whether or not the L69 proposal is indeed effectively supported by as much as 80 states, as claimed in 2012, is debatable (Swart 2013: 50).

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the audience at the 23rd IPSA World Congress of Political Science, 19–24 July, 2014, Montreal, Canada, where an earlier draft of this paper was presented, and three anonymous reviewers for comments. He is also grateful to Robert Leech for providing him with the programmes used in computing voting power indices.

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    Alexandru Volacu

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Volacu, A. A priori voting power distribution under contemporary Security Council reform proposals. J Int Relat Dev 21, 247–274 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2015.32

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