Abstract
Power indices are meant to assess the power that a voting rule confers a priori to each of the decision makers who use it. In order to test and compare them, some authors have proposed ‘natural’ postulates that a measure of a priori voting power ‘should’ satisfy, the violations of which are called ‘voting power paradoxes.’ In this paper two general measures of success and decisiveness based on the voting rule and voters' behavior and some of these postulates/paradoxes test each other. As a result serious doubts are cast on the discriminating power of most voting power postulates.
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This research has been supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología under project BEC2000-0875, and by the Universidad del País Vasco, under project UPV/EHU00031.321-HA-7918/2000. The first author acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología under the Ramón y Cajal programme and from the IVIE. This paper was started while the first author was staying at the University of the Basque Country with a grant from the Basque Governement.
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Laruelle, A., Valenciano, F. A critical reappraisal of some voting power paradoxes. Public Choice 125, 17–41 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-005-3408-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-005-3408-5