This paper extends the Baron-Ferejohn model of legislative bargaining to general weighted majority games with two modifications: first, payoff division can only be agreed upon after the coalition has formed (two-stage bargaining); second, negotiations in the coalition can break down, in which...

Power indices suggest that adding new members to a voting body may increase the power of an existing member, even if the number of votes of all existing members and the decision rule remain constant. This phenomenon is known as the paradox of new members. This paper shows that the paradox has...

We study a legislative bargaining game in which failure to agree in a given round may result in a breakdown of negotiations. In that case, each player receives an exogenous ‘disagreement value'. We characterize the set of stationary subgame perfect equilibria under all q-majority rules. Under...

This paper examines the relationship between voting weights and expected equilibrium payoffs in legislative bargaining and provides a necessary and sufficient condition for payoffs to be proportional to weights. This condition has a natural interpretation in terms of the supply and demand for...

We analyze and evaluate the different decision rules describing the Council of Ministers of the EU starting from 1958 up to date. Most of the existing studies use the Banzhaf index (for binary voting) or the Shapley-Shubik index (for distributive politics). We argue in favor of the nucleolus as...

Many important decisions are taken according to weighted majority rule. Power indices predict that enlargement of the voting body may affect the balance of power between the original members even if their number of votes and the decision rule remain constant. Some of the existing voters may...