When voters fear that politicians may have a right-wing bias or that they may be influenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of true left-wing conviction are valuable. As a consequence, even a moderate politician seeking reelection chooses ‘populist’ policies – i.e., policies to the...

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 indices have been used to evaluate the allocation of power in a wide range of voting situations. While they use the language of game theory known measures of a priori voting power are hardly more than statistical expectations assuming the random behaviour of the players. We introduce a...

Approval voting allows voters to list any number of candidates. Their scores are obtained by summing the votes cast in their favor. Fractional voting instead follows the One-person-one-vote principle by endowing voters with a single vote that they may freely distribute among candidates. In this...

In general, analyses of voting power are performed through the notion of a simple voting game (SVG) in which every voter can choose between two options: 'yes' or 'no'. Felsenthal and Machover (1997) introduced the concept of ternary voting games (TVGs) which recognizes abstention alongside. They...

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 member's...

We consider a committee that consists of n members with one person one vote approving a proposal if the number of affirmative votes from the members reaches threshold k. Which threshold k between 1 and n is "good" for the committee? We suppose that if a new threshold k' proposed by some...

We investigate the method of power indices to study voting power of members of a legislature that has voting blocs. Our analysis is theoretical, intended to contribute to a theory of positive political science in which social actors are motivated by the pursuit of power as measured by objective...

The study addresses important issues relating to computational aspects of coalition formation. However, finding payoffs -- imputations belonging to the core -- is, while almost as well known, an overly complex, NP-hard problem, even for modern supercomputers. The issue becomes uncertain because,...

In the presence of competing interest groups, this paper examines how the form of vote-buying contracts affects policy outcomes. We study contracts contingent upon individual votes, policy outcomes, and/or vote shares. Voters either care about their individual votes, or about the policy outcome....