This thesis deals with the measurement of voting power in different decision environments. After a short introduction in Chapter 1, several established concepts for power analysis are reviewed and applied in Chapters 2 and 3. Chapters 4 and 5 step on new ground by introducing a power index for a...

Increasing number of studies is focusing attention to constitutional analysis of European Union institutions and distribution of intra-institutional and inter-institutional influence in the European Union decision making. Most of the studies are related to distribution of voting power in the EU...

There are many situations in which different groups make collective decisions by committee voting, where each group is represented by a single person. Theoretical concepts suggest how the voting systems in such committees should be designed, but these abstract rules can usually not be...

The possible exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union will have profound economic and political effects. Here we look at a particular aspect, the power distribution in the Council of the European Union. Since the Lisbon treaty the exit does not require new negotiations as the success...

Increasing number of studies is focusing attention to constitutional analysis of European Union institutions and distribution of intra-institutional and inter-institutional influence in the European Union decision making. Most of the studies are related to distribution of voting power in the EU...

In this paper I will show that it is always possible to draw representation districts that will be simultaneously close in both total population and citizen voting age population (or, indeed, any pair of populations that is desired.) Thus the Supreme Court need not choose between equalizing...

The exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union has had profound economic and political effects. Here, we look at a particular aspect, the power distribution in the Council of the European Union. Using the Shapley-Shubik power index, we calculate the member states' powers with and without...

In this article, we empirically study the survival of the ruling party in parliamentary democracies using a hazard rate model. We define survival of a crisis as being successful in a critical vote in the parliament. We develop a general probabilistic model of political crises and test it...

Politics in the Council is Janus-faced. There is bargaining with identifiable winners and losers, yet the voting records show high levels of agreement. These two sides have almost exclusively been studied in isolation even though standard theoretical models of voting typically assume that...

This paper develops the symmetric power order, a measure of voting power for multicandidate elections. The measure generalizes standard pivotality-based voting power measures for binary elections, such as Banzhaf power. At the same time, the measure is not based on pivotality, but rather on a...