Measuring voting power in an international institution: the United States and the inter-American development bank

Jonathan R. Strand

Economics of Governance, 2003, vol. 4, issue 1, 19-36

Abstract: This paper applies a measure of relative voting power to the weighted voting system of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). Almost all assessments of internal governance of the IADB and other international financial institutions make reference to members' votes as a proxy for relative influence. But as this paper demonstrates, voting weights are misleading. The number of votes a country has in a weighted voting system does not necessarily denote its ability to affect outcomes. The conventional wisdom holds that the United States is omnipotent in the IADB because it has a large number (over 30 percent) of all the votes. This paper reveals that the U.S. obtains much more control over outcomes than originally intended by the institutions' designers. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003

Keywords: Key words: weighted voting; a priori voting power; Inter-American Development Bank; Johnston power index; JEL Classification: F0; C71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ecogov:v:4:y:2003:i:1:p:19-36

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DOI: 10.1007/s101010100042

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