Traditional power indices are not suited to take account of explicit preferences, strategic interaction, and particular decision procedures. This paper studies a new way to measure decision power, based on fully specified spatial preferences and strategic interaction in an explicit voting game...

The paper analyzes the appointment of the European Commission as a strategic game between members of the European Parliament and the Council. The focal equilibrium results in Commissioners that duplicate policy preferences of national Council representatives. Different internal decision rules...

The paper analyzes the appointment of the European Commission as a strategic game between members of the European Parliament and the Council. The focal equilibrium results in Commissioners that duplicate the policy preferences of national Council representatives. Different internal decision...

This article replies to the claim that preference-based power indices are impossible and that preferences should be ignored when assessing actors’ influence in different interactions (Braham and Holler [2005] ‘The Impossibility of a Preference-based Power Index’, Journal of...

This paper analyzes the a priori influence of the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of Ministers (CM) on legislation of the European Union adopted under its codecision procedure. In contrast to studies which use conventional power indices, both institutions are assumed to act...

The European Union (EU) has moved towards bicameralism, making the codecision procedure its most important mechanism for decision making. To gauge if European Parliament (EP) and Council of Ministers (CM) are equally powerful ‘codecision makers’, understanding of the final stage of the...

Power indices like those of Shapley and Shubik (1954) or Banzhaf (1965) measure the distribution of power in simple games. This paper points at a deficiency shared by all established indices: players who are inferior in the sense of having to accept (almost) no share of the spoils in return for...