We propose an empirically relevant measure of voting power that uses the information about real or assumed voting patterns conveyed by a joint probability distribution on the set of voting outcomes, and apply it to the voting data of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Lecture Notes prepared for Summer School, “EU Decision Making : Assessment and Design of Procedures”, San Sebastian, Spain, July 8-11, 2002.

The Double Majority rule in the Treaty is claimed to be simpler, more transparent and more democratic than the existing rule. We examine these questions against the democratic ideal that the votes of all citizens in whatever member country should be of equal value using voting power analysis...

Weighted voting games are ubiquitous mathematical models which are used in economics, political science, neuroscience, threshold logic, reliability theory and distributed systems. They model situations where agents with variable voting weight vote in favour of or against a decision. A coalition...

The constitutions of the Bretton Woods Institutions require decisions to be taken by weighted voting: each member country possesses a number of votes, depending on its quota allocation, all of which must always be cast as a bloc. This leads to a problem of democratic legitimacy since a...

We investigate the applicability of voting power indices, in particular the Penrose index (aka absolute Banzhaf index), in the analysis of voting blocs by means of a hypothetical voting body. We use the power of individual bloc members to study the implications of the formation of blocs and how...

Much current research in functional MRI employs multivariate machine learning approaches (e.g., support vector machines) to detect fine-scale spatial patterns from the temporal fluctuations of the neural signal. The aim of many studies is not classification, however, but investigation of...

A priori voting power analysis can be useful in helping to design a weighted voting system that has certain intended properties. Power indices can help determine how many weighted votes each member should be allocated and what the decision rule should be. These choices can be made in the light...

In his well known 1971 paper the mathematical sociologist James S. Coleman, proposed three measures of voting power : (1) "the power of a collectivity to act", (2) "the power to prevent action" and (3) "the power to initiate action". (1) is a measure of the overall decisiveness of a voting body...

An exercise in the empirical use of voting power indices from cooperative game theory applied to ownership data for large companies, this paper contributes in two areas : (1) the analysis of company control based on shareholder voting power, and (2) the empirical use of power indices and...