ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that political skill sometimes plays quite a central role in the formation of public policies. It also emphasises the role of agenda in determining the policy outcomes. The scholarly debate on the reform of EU institutions focuses to a large extent on aspects of power distribution in the Council of Ministers and/or the European Parliament. If the aim is to make EU decision making more efficient, then surely not just the weight distribution and majority threshold, but also the voting procedures, are of paramount importance. An obvious corollary of McKelvey's theorem is that, under the stated conditions, the voting outcome may be an alternative that is Pareto dominated. The procedures used in EU decision making may render the study of vote distribution of secondary importance. Political skill is largely ignored in modelling collective decision making, yet it plays a crucial role in determining the voting outcomes.
