How Should Votes Be Weighted to Reflect the Existing and “Calculated” Distribution of Voting Power of Weighted Voting Organizations Integrating Different Majority Requirements?

Michèle Khouri-Hagot () and Bertrand Lemennicier ()
Additional contact information
Michèle Khouri-Hagot: Centre de Recherche sur l’Economie de Droit (CRED), Panthéon-Assas
Bertrand Lemennicier: Centre de Recherche sur l’Economie de Droit (CRED), Panthéon-Assas

A chapter in The Political Economy of Governance, 2015, pp 267-289 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Voting weight and voting power are not necessarily equal. The former represents the number of votes allocated to each member while the latter represents the ability of a member to influence voting outcomes. In this paper, we observe that, in general, ‘calculated’ voting powers, measured by the normalized Banzhaf index, tend to be linearly linked to voting weight. However, there are key exceptions; larger countries or ‘outliers’ have powers far less or more than proportional to their weight and their powers vary with majority requirements. First, based on a sample of weighted voting organizations [(African Development Bank (AfDB), International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and International Monetary Fund (IMF)], we ask, ourselves, how the votes should be weighted to reflect the existing and ‘calculated’ distribution of voting power, or the potential ‘calculated’ voting powers a larger country could expect with its ‘existing’ voting weight if proportionately between weight and voting power is the one observed for all other smaller countries and is the desired one. In this last case we offer an estimation of the opportunity cost of cooperation in the international organization in terms of loss of power but at the same time an estimation of the minimum implicit gains which cover these costs.

Keywords: Member State; International Monetary Fund; Power Index; Large Contributor; Linear Curve (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stpocp:978-3-319-15551-7_15

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319155517

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-15551-7_15

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Studies in Political Economy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().