Hledání politicky nestranné metody rozdělení křesel v evropském parlamentu mezi členské země: srovnání cambridgeského kompromisu s dalšími navrhovanými metodami
Searching for Politically Impartial Method of Apportioning the European Parliamentary Seats among the EU Member States: Comparing the Cambridge Compromise with other Proposed Methods

Summary/Abstract: Modern democratic political systems are hardly conceivable without political representation. This also applies to the European Union, a unique political system with a directly elected and fully-fledged assembly representing the EU citizens, with the European Parliament being the first international parliamentary assembly to strive for democratic political representation. The case study addresses the composition of the European Parliament, or more specifically, it focuses on methods of apportioning the European Parliamentary seats among the EU Member States according to the degressive proportionality principle as codified by the Lisbon Treaty. First, the paper discusses the principle of degressive proportionality, both from a theoretical and empirical perspective, in the latter case taking into account the composition of the European Parliament since the first popular elections in 1979. Subsequently, the study discusses the most relevant proposed European Parliamentary seat apportionment methods, i.e. the Cambridge Compromise, the Power Compromise and the 0,5-DPL method, and seeks to analyse their consequences on the representation of the EU Member States in the European Parliament. The paper concludes that the Cambridge compromise is the most appropriate of the methods discussed as it best meets the requirements of the Lisbon Treaty and related documents for the composition of the European Parliament.

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