Electing the Pope

László Kóczy () and Balázs Sziklai

No 1301, Working Paper Series from Óbuda University, Keleti Faculty of Business and Management

Abstract: Few elections attract so much attention as the Papal Conclave that elects the religious leader of over a billion Catholics worldwide. The Conclave is an interesting case of qualied majority voting with many participants and no formal voting blocks. Each cardinal is a well-known public figure with publicly available personal data and well-known positions on public matters. This provides excellent grounds for a study of spatial voting: In this brief note we study voting in the Papal Conclave after the resignation of Benedict XVI. We describe the method of the election and based on a simple estimation of certain factors that seem to influence the electors' preferences we calculate the power of each cardinal in the conclave as the Shapley-Shubik index of the corresponding voting game over a convex geometry.

Keywords: Papal Conclave; game over convex geometry; Shapley-Shubik index JEL Codes: C71; C72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2013-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-gth and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Working Paper: Electing the Pope (2013)
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