Application of a Power Function to Allocating Seats in the European Parliament Before and After Brexit

Abstract

The paper puts forward a proposal how to apply a power function to allocate the seats in the European Parliament. First, a sequence of populations representing the entitlements of member states is modified by a power function, and then the allocation is performed using the classical, divisor method of apportionment. The results are compared with those obtained by a well-known allocation method called Cambridge Compromise. Our construction and conclusions regard a specific problem of establishing the composition of the European Parliament, but they can be easily generalized to any case of degressively proportional allocation of goods and obligations.