Coalitional power indices applied to voting systems

Abstract

We describe voting mechanisms to study voting systems. The classical power indices applied to simple games just consider parties, players or voters. Here, we also consider games with a priori unions, i.e., coalitions among parties, players or voters. We measure the power of each party, player or voter when there are coalitions among them. In particular, we study real situations of voting systems using extended Shapley–Shubik and Banzhaf indices, the so-called coalitional power indices. We also introduce a dynamic programming to compute them.