On the design of voting games

By focusing on the protectionist tendency found in the design of voting games, a thorough analysis is provided for the role of blocking coalitions in a simple game. We characterize those blocking families that univocally determine the game, and show that otherwise at least three games share a given nonempty blocking family, also giving an upper bound for the number of such games. Some examples illustrate the application of these ideas to political science. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2004