Power, Freedom, and Voting

This interdisciplinary work offers comprehensive insight into three concepts at the heart of democracy and social welfare theory. The text explores methodologies for measurement of power and freedom, empirical studies of coalitions in voting bodies, and more.

Power, Freedom, and Voting is an interdisciplinary book that presents a comprehensive insight into current research by economists, mathematicians, philosophers and political scientists on three intimately related concepts that are at the heart of theories of democracy and social welfare. The editors have brought together some of the leading scholars in the different fields to create a distinctive volume. Chapters include contributions on foundational and methodological issues in the definition and measurement of power and freedom and empirical studies of power and coalition formation in voting bodies. The volume also contains contributions that make an effort to bridge the gaps between different disciplinary approaches, including one on the importance of Machiavelli's writing as a reference point for modern political theory, and others on the related concepts of fairness and responsibility. A majority of the chapters make use of game theory.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt
Social Power and Social Causation: Towards a Formal Synthesis.- Power Indices Methodology: Decisiveness, Pivots, and Swings.- Further Reflections on the Expediency and Stability of Alliances.- Positional Power in Hierarchies.- A Public Help Index.- Shapley-Shubik vs. Strategic Power: Live from the UN Security Council.- Modified Power Indices for Indirect Voting.- Pivotal Voting Theory: The 1993 Clinton Health Care Reform Proposal in the U.S. Congress.- Coalition Formation Theories Revisited: An Empirical Investigation of Aumann's Hypothesis.- Coalition Formation, Agenda Selection, and Power.- Democratic Defences and (De-)Stabilisations.- The Instability of Power Sharing.- The Power to Propose versus the Power to Oppose.- Divergence in the Spatial Stochastic Model of Voting.- Closeness Counts in Social Choice.- Freedom, Coercion, and Ability.- Guarantees in Game Forms.- Individual Control in Decision-Making and Attitudes Towards Inequality: The Case of Italy.- The Principle of Fairness: A Game Theoretic Model.- Power, Productivity, and Profits.- Trust, Responsibility, Power, and Social Capital.- Exploiting The Prince.