Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that, by coordinating voting behavior,these interest groups increase the winning set, which is defined as the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that the presence of these interest groups increases the winning set, which is the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the incumbent. Therefore interest...

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...

There are many situations in which different groups make collective decisions by committee voting, with each group represented by a single person. A natural question is what voting system such a committee should use. Concepts based on voting power provide guidelines for this choice. The two most...

We introduce the prediction value (PV) as a measure of players' informational importance in probabilistic TU games. The latter combine a standard TU game and a probability distribution over the set of coalitions. Player i's prediction value equals the difference between the conditional...

Power index research has been a very active field in the last decades. Will this continue or are all the important questions solved? We argue that there are still many opportunities to conduct useful research with and on power indices. Positive and normative questions keep calling for...

Transparent decision-making processes are widely regarded as a prerequisite for the working of a representative democracy. It facilitates accountability, and citizens may suspect that decisions, if taken behind closed doors, do not promote their interests. Why else the secrecy? We provide a...

A committee makes a decision on a project on behalf of the public. Members of the committee agree on the a priori value of the project, and hold additional private information about its consequences. They are experts who care about the value of the project and about being considered well...

Whether Federal Reserve Bank presidents have the right to vote on the U.S. monetary policy committee depends on a mechanical, yearly rotation scheme. Rotation is without exclusion: also nonvoting presidents attend and participate in the meetings of the committee. Does voting status change...

A well-known rationale for representative democracy is that direct democracy leads to a free-rider problem as to the collection of information. A problem with this rationale is that it takes for granted that representatives collect information. In this paper we examine whether or not electoral...