ABSTRACT
Equitability is a democratic desideratum of the two-tier decision-making structure in which the European citizens are the indirect voters at the lower tier. Equitability is not the only democratic desideratum, however. Two other principles are empowerment of the people and majoritarianism. From a detached scientific viewpoint, there is complete symmetry between both components of absolute voting power: the positive power to help getting a resolution adopted, and the negative power to help getting it blocked - Coleman's 'power to initiate action' and 'power to prevent action', respectively. Indeed, Penrose's measure of voting power is a harmonic mean of these two Coleman measures. In the Jagiellonian scheme, the weights are calculated directly, in a fairly simple way, from population figures, while the concept of voting power does not enter explicitly into the calculation. Most people can easily understand the concept of voting weight, but are baffled by the scientific concept of voting power.
