We examine the relationship between voting weights and expected equilibrium payoffs in legislative bargaining and provide a necessary and sufficient condition for payoffs to be proportional to weights. This condition has a natural interpretation in terms of the supply and demand for coalition...

Power indices suggest that adding new members to a voting body may affect the balance of power between the original members even if their number of votes and the decision rule remain constant. Some of the original members may actually gain, a phenomenon known as the paradox of new members. We...

What explains significant variation across countries in the use of vote buying instead of campaign promises to secure voter support? This paper explicitly models the tradeoff parties face between engaging in vote buying and making campaign promises, and explores the distributional consequences...