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...

While they use the language of game theory known measures of a priory voting power are hardly more than statistical expectations assuming voters behave randomly. Focusing on normalised indices we show that rational players would behave differently from the in-dices predictions and propose a...

The European Union used to make decisions by unanimity or near unanimity. After a series of extensions, with 27 member states the present decision making mechanisms have become very slow and assigned power to the members in an arbitrary way. The new decision rules accepted as part of the Lisbon...

The traditional voting games are special transferable utility cooperative games, so-called simple games, where the players are the parties and the value of a coalition may be 1 or 0 depending on the ability of the coalition to pass a motion or not. In this paper we introduce general weighted...

Voting power in voting situations is measured by the probability of changing decisions by altering the cast 'yes' or 'no' votes. Recently this analysis has been extended by strategic abstention. Abstention, just as 'yes' or 'no' votes can change decisions. This theory is often applied to...

A voting situation is given by a set of voters and the rules of legislation that determine minimal requirements for a group of voters to pass a motion. A priori measures of voting power, such as the Shapley-Shubik index and the Banzhaf value, show the influence of the individual players in a...

Few elections attract so much attention as the Papal Conclave that elects the religious leader of over a billion Catholics worldwide. The Conclave is an interesting case of qualified majority voting with many participants and no formal voting blocks. Each cardinal is a well-known public gure...

In this paper we analyze the consequences of the fairness recommendation of the Venice Commission in allocating voting districts among larger administrative regions. This recommendation requires the size of any constituency not to differ from the average constituency size by more than a fixed...

While they use the language of game theory known measures of a priory voting power are hardly more than statistical expectations assuming voters behave randomly. Focusing on normalised indices we show that rational players would behave differently from the in-dices predictions and propose a...

Voting power in voting situations is measured by the probability of changing decisions by altering the cast 'yes' or 'no' votes. Recently this analysis has been extended by strategic abstention. Abstention, just as 'yes' or 'no' votes can change decisions. This theory is often applied to...