We study political distortions that emerge in situations where agents’ political power is disproportionate with respect to their economic power. We use the Shapley value to evaluate both the economic and the political power. We show that usual weighted majority voting cannot prevent political distortions from emerging in a huge mass of situations. Distortions are less severe if partners can leave the union at lowcost.We propose an alternative voting method based on random assignments of voting rights. Agents are given chances to vote instead of weights. If chances are computed according to a specific formula, no politicaldistortion occurs. As an application, we analyze the rotation voting system recently adopted by theEuropean Central Bank. We find that this system yields an enormous amount of political distortion. Thenwe compute the voting chances that should be assigned to Eurozone countries in order to eliminate it.[...]

Voting chances instead of voting weights

PASSARELLI, Francesco
2013-01-01

Abstract

We study political distortions that emerge in situations where agents’ political power is disproportionate with respect to their economic power. We use the Shapley value to evaluate both the economic and the political power. We show that usual weighted majority voting cannot prevent political distortions from emerging in a huge mass of situations. Distortions are less severe if partners can leave the union at lowcost.We propose an alternative voting method based on random assignments of voting rights. Agents are given chances to vote instead of weights. If chances are computed according to a specific formula, no politicaldistortion occurs. As an application, we analyze the rotation voting system recently adopted by theEuropean Central Bank. We find that this system yields an enormous amount of political distortion. Thenwe compute the voting chances that should be assigned to Eurozone countries in order to eliminate it.[...]
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11575/4081
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