On the Weights of Nations: Assigning Voting Weights in a Heterogeneous Union
- Creators
- Barberà, Salvador
- Jackson, Matthew O.
Abstract
Consider a voting procedure where countries, states, or districts comprising a union each elect representatives who then participate in later votes at the union level on their behalf. The countries, provinces, and states may vary in their populations and composition. If we wish to maximize the total expected utility of all agents in the union, how to weight the votes of the representatives of the different countries, states or districts at the union level? We provide a simple characterization of the efficient voting rule in terms of the weights assigned to different districts and the voting threshold (how large a qualified� majority is needed to induce change versus the status quo). Next, in the context of a model of the correlation structure of agents preferences, we analyze how voting weights relate to the population size of a country. We then analyze the voting weights in Council of the European Union under the Nice Treaty and the recently proposed constitution, and contrast them under different versions of our model, and compare them to the weights derived from poll data.
Additional Information
Financial support from the National Science Foundation is gratefully acknowledged under grants SES-9986190 and SES-0316493, as is Financial support of the Barcelona Economics program (CREA), and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture through grant PB98-0870; from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through grant BEC2002-002130, and from the Generalitat of Catalonia through grant SGR2001-00162. We thank Ken Binmore, Jon Eguia, Annick Laruelle, Giovanni Maggi, and Federico Valenciano for helpful discussions and comments. We are very grateful Danilo Coelho for research assistance with the Eurobarometer data. Published as Barbera, S., & Jackson, M.O. (2006). On the weights of nations: assigning voting weights in a heterogeneous union. Journal of Political Economy, 114(2), 317-339.Attached Files
Submitted - sswp1196.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 79610
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170731-134203644
- SES-9986190
- NSF
- SES-0316493
- NSF
- CREA-Barcelona Economics
- PB98-0870
- Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (MECD)
- BEC2002-002130
- Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN)
- SGR2001-00162
- Generalitat of Catalonia
- Created
-
2017-08-01Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2019-10-03Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Social Science Working Papers
- Series Name
- Social Science Working Paper
- Series Volume or Issue Number
- 1196