Towards an Analysis of Voting Power in Parliament: an Exploration into Coalition-Making in Nordic Parliaments
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Towards an Analysis of Voting Power in Parliament: an Exploration into Coalition-Making in Nordic Parliaments Jan-Erik Lanea and Reinert Maelandb a
Department of Political Science, The University of Geneva, Uni-Mail, 1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland. E-mail: [email protected] b Department of Statistics, Lund University, Lund, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]
In this explorative paper, coalitions in national assemblies are analysed as n-person games with the Penrose-Banzhaf solution concept. It is shown that forming minority coalitions may result from a rational strategy to maximize voting power. Thus, there is no need to attempt a permanent minimum winning coalition. Moreover, maximizing voting power for a group of players like a disciplined political party involves the making of temporary coalitions over the entire political space, as anything goes. The examples looked at include the present Nordic parliamentary situation in Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Iceland. Acta Politica (2007) 42, 355–379. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500169 Keywords: calculus and interpretation; Nordic parliaments; minority coalitions; Wicksell’s unanimity principle; Penrose-Banzhaf approach; Machiavellianism as maximizing voting power; multipartism
Introduction In the application of game theory to politics there arise certain fundamental questions that concern the preconditions of the application of the entire rational choice enterprise. ‘What is the range of rational decision-making in our social systems?’ is one such often-discussed presupposition (Etzioni, 1990). Here, we will discuss the following question: What is rational behaviour in a group of players taking collective choices, such as for instance the national assembly? Below we will discuss legislative and budgetary politics as an n-person game with disciplined political parties as the actors, using legislative politics in the Nordic countries as examples of voting games. The basic assumption is that the players attempt to maximize their voting power by means of coalitions. We will show that government as a minority coalition may be less the result of exogenous constraints imposed by the electoral system (PR) and the immutable cleavage lines in the social structure. Instead, it may be the result of the
Jan-Erik Lane and Reinert Maeland Nordic Parliaments
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ambition to maximize voting power, typical of rational choice, especially if one allows for Machiavellianism among the players, meaning that any coalition is feasible, as long as it is a winning one. Thus, we add to the assumptions of rational choice also the presupposition of opportunism with guile. When a group comprises three or more players who will cooperate in order to form winning coalitions, then one speaks about n-person game theory (Shubik, 1985). The rules of the game are known in advance as aggregation according to simple majority, qualified majority or unanimity, following from an attribution of votes according to the principle: one man — one vote. The value of the game would be 1, namel
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