In this paper we measure the effect of the quota on the difficulty of making decisions in the EU-25 Council after the next enlargement. We compute the probability of a proposal being rejected in the Council. This probability depends on the voting rule (and therefore on the quota) and on the...

Committees are often made up of representatives of different-sized groups of individuals, and make decisions by means of a voting rule which specifies what vote configurations can pass a decision. This raises the question of the choice of the optimal voting rule, given the different sizes of the...

How can networking affect the turnout in an election? We present a simple model to explain turnout as a result of a dynamic process of formation of the intention to vote within Erdös-Renyi random networks. Citizens have fixed preferences for one of two parties and are embedded in a given social...

In this paper we address several issues related to collective dichotomous decision-making by means of quaternary voting rules, i.e., when voters may choose between four actions: voting yes, voting no, abstaining and not turning up-which are aggregated by a voting rule into a dichotomous...