An upper bound on the dimension of the voting system of the European Union Council under the Lisbon rules

Abstract

The voting rules of the European Council (EU) under the Treaty of Lisbon became effective on 1 November 2014. Kurz \& Napel (2015) showed that the dimension of this voting system is between $7$ and $13,368$. The lower bound $7$ actually sets a new world record for the dimension of the real-world voting bodies. In this article, by finding a new way to represent the union of two weighted games as an intersection of certain weighted games (Theorem 1), we greatly reduce the upper bound $13,368$ to just $25$. We also consider what will happen to our upper bound and Kurz \& Napel's lower bound if the United Kingdom is no longer a member of the European Union Council.