Voting or consensus? An empirical study of decision-making in the European standards body ETSI

In recent years, notable attention has been paid to the governance aspects of standard-setting organizations and their implications for the legitimacy of standardization. The recent European Commission policy on standardization has fuelled this interest by requesting ETSI, one of the three formal European Standardisation Organisations, to make changes to its governance and voting rules. This raises the question of how important voting actually is and when and how it is used. This paper contributes to the debate on legitimacy by providing an empirical analysis of voting at ETSI, the European standards body for telecommunications, and by reflecting on the significance of the recent reforms in the light of decision-making at ETSI. We conclude that, despite all the attention to voting, this mechanism is used in only 4.6% of all decisions taken by the General Assembly (GA), the highest authority in ETSI and responsible for its governance, and 95.4% of such decisions are taken via the consensus mechanism instead.