Proximity in Coalition Building

Voting power methodology offers insights to understand coalition building in collective decision making. This paper proposes a new measure of voting power inspired from Banzhaf (1965) accounting for the proximity between voters by capturing how often they appear in winning coalitions together. Using this proximity index, we introduce a notion of relative linkages among coalition participants as determinant of coalition building. We propose an application to the governance structure of the International Monetary Fund, with linkages being represented by bilateral volumes of trade between voters. The results are able to explain several important features of the functioning of this particular voting body, and may be useful for other applications in international politics.