Is it Better to Be Powerful or Lucky? Part 2

Abstract

Abstract. Part I of this article comprising sections I‐III, which appeared in the issue for June 1980 (Vol. XXVIII, No. 2), offered a critique of some standard power indices. Part 2 is devoted to working out an alternative way of thinking about power. Section IV defines success as luck plus decisiveness. Section v illustrates the use of these concepts by applying them to the example of the US Constitutional Convention. Section VI offers a definition of power in terms of the conditions under which an actor can be decisive. It is then suggested that power should increase in importance to an actor the more uncertain that actor is of the likely alignment of forces in the relevant period of time.

Information or context: what accounts for positional proximity between the European Commission and lobbyists?

“…In the research presented here, we cannot rule out that lobbyists find their positions closely matched by the policy-maker owing to 'luck' rather than influence (cf. Barry 1980). However, while individual policy actors might occasionally be lucky, if luck was all that matters we should not observe statistically significant associations between positional proximity and the variables that, as we have argued, serve to explain some of this proximity.…”

On the Weights of Nations: Assigning Voting Weights in a Heterogeneous Union

“…A main thread there has been to produce power indices, such as the Shapley-Shubik (1954) and Banzhaf (1965) indices, which measure things such as the relative probabilities that different voters are pivotal. While some researchers have built power measures based on satisfaction (i.e., total utility) and contrasted them with power measures built on decisiveness (see, e.g., Dubey and Shapley 1979;Barry 1980;Laruelle and Valenciano 2003), our perspective is still quite different. Our aim is not to measure power or satisfaction or to compare rules under such measures, but instead to study the optimal design of voting rules.…”

Political Prowess or “Lady Luck”? Evaluating Chief Executives’ Legislative Success Rates

“…More realistic models designed to accommodate different configurations of legislators' preferences and seat distributions (and departures from equiprobability) can yield predictions that are very similar to the ones obtained from this model. Following Barry (1980), consider a legislature composed of three parties, with weights of three, two, and two votes, and where a majority of five out of seven votes is needed for the passage of a measure. Call the player with three votes player A and the other two players B and C. Assume also that the chief executive belongs to the party A.…”