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Self-test questions
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1Exclusive competence areas are areas where the EU alone decides.
A)True
B)False



2There are two types of shared competence: those whereby members can pass legislation in areas where the EU has already done so and those whereby the existence of EU legislation hinders members’ rights to make policy in the same area
A)True
B)False



3Fiscal federalism is a framework that is useful for thinking about the various trade-offs faced when allocating different types of decisions to the EU versus the Member States.
A)True
B)False



4The Lisbon Treaty removed the 3 pillars of the European Union.
A)True
B)False



5The 'Passage Probability' is a measure of the ease of making decisions under institutional systems.
A)True
B)False



6The passage probability for the Nice Treaty Council of Ministers voting rules is higher than that of the draft of the Constitutional Treaty.
A)True
B)False



7For a given group of voters each with a given number of votes, raising the majority threshold from 50 per cent to, say, 72 per cent can never increase the group’s decision making efficiency.
A)True
B)False



8Scale economies is a factor that generally favours placing decision making at the EU level, while local informational advantages generally favours placing it at the Member State level.
A)True
B)False



9Subsidiarity principle states that decisions should be taken as close to the people as possible.
A)True
B)False



10The principle of proportionality means that when an EU action is necessary it should be undertaken with the maximum necessary actions.
A)True
B)False



11The goal of the Nice Treaty was to ensure the enlarged EU could continue to take decisions in an efficient and legitimate manner
A)True
B)False



12The Normalized Banzhaf Index (NBI) gauges how likely it is that a nation finds itself in a position to ‘break’ a winning coalition on a randomly selected issue. The questions of who sets the voting agenda, how coalitions are formed and how intensively each country holds its various positions are not considered.
A)True
B)False



13The voting reforms in the Constitutional Treaty were developed even before the voting reforms in the Nice Treaty were tried.
A)True
B)False



14Which of the following are the main trade-offs in the theory of fiscal federalism?
A)Lower costs due to scale versus loss from one-size-fits-all policy, efficiency versus legitimacy, wider versus deeper, subsidiarity versus solidarity.
B)Tax rate versus tax base, efficiency versus legitimacy, wider versus deeper, subsidiarity versus solidarity.
C)Lower costs due to scale versus loss from one-size-fits-all policy, informational advantage of taking decisions close to voters versus coordination of multi-district spillovers.
D)None of the above.



15The passage probability is:
A)the probability that any proposal can be passed.
B)an estimate of the fraction of proposal that will actually pass (as opposed to being rejected).
C)the probability that a proposal is passed from the Council to the Parliament.
D)the likelihood that a randomly drawn proposal would pass.



16The main reason that the 2004 and 2006 enlargements of the EU might reduce decision-making efficiency is:
A)the new comers are likely to vote as a block and oppose most proposals.
B)the fact that each nation gets one vote in the Council of Ministers makes it much harder to find a majority with more nations as members.
C)most of the newcomers are small and thus would receive a disproportionate number of votes.
D)the efficiency of any voting system decreases whenever more members join, regardless of the distribution of votes.



17External trade policy is an exclusive competency of the EU; this is justified in the theory of fiscal federalism by:
A)scale economies.
B)local preferences and informational advantages.
C)negative spillovers.
D)None of the above.



18Under the pre-2004-enlarge system of voting in the Council of Ministers, large countries have more votes than small nations. Is their voting power more or less than population proportionality would suggest?
A)More
B)Less
C)Neither



19The flexibility clause says that the EU can act only in areas where Member States have conferred power to it in the Treaties.
A)True
B)False



20When necessary, the EU can obtain additional competences even if these tasks and decisions were not assigned to the EU level. This is allowed by:
A)The Flexibility clause
B)The Subsidary principle
C)The Conferral principle
D)The principle of proportionality



21What proposition about the 'passage probability' is false?
A)It determines how likely it is that the Council would approve a randomly selected issue.
B)It is computed as the ratio of the number of winning coalitions over the total number of potential coalitions.
C)With the Nice Treaty, the ways to block in Council have significantly decreased.
D)It is a useful measure of change in decision-making efficiency.







Author OLCOnline Learning Center

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