IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/not/notcdx/2007-12.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Paradox of New Members in the Council of Ministers: A Noncooperative Approach

Author

Listed:
  • Maria Montero

    (University of Nottingham)

Abstract

Power indices suggest that adding new members to a voting body may increase the power of an existing member, even if the number of votes of all existing members and the decision rule remain constant. This phenomenon is known as the paradox of new members. This paper shows that the paradox has theoretically occurred in the EU using the leading model of legislative bargaining. Furthermore, it is possible for a majority of members to be in favor of enlargement, even if voters are bargaining over a fixed budget.

Suggested Citation

  • Maria Montero, 2007. "The Paradox of New Members in the Council of Ministers: A Noncooperative Approach," Discussion Papers 2007-12, The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham.
    • Handle: RePEc:not:notcdx:2007-12
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cedex/documents/papers/2007-12.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Baron, David P. & Ferejohn, John A., 1989. "Bargaining in Legislatures," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 83(4), pages 1181-1206, December.
    2. Maria Montero & Martin Sefton & Ping Zhang, 2008. "Enlargement and the balance of power: an experimental study," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 30(1), pages 69-87, January.
    3. Moshé Machover & Dan S. Felsenthal, 2001. "The Treaty of Nice and qualified majority voting," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 18(3), pages 431-464.
    4. Eraslan, Hülya & McLennan, Andrew, 2013. "Uniqueness of stationary equilibrium payoffs in coalitional bargaining," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 148(6), pages 2195-2222.
    5. Michalis Drouvelis & Maria Montero & Martin Sefton, 2007. "The Paradox of New Members: Strategic Foundations and Experimental Evidence," Discussion Papers 2007-13, The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham.
    6. Dan S. Felsenthal & Moshé Machover, 1998. "The Measurement of Voting Power," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 1489.
    7. Banks, Jeffrey s. & Duggan, John, 2000. "A Bargaining Model of Collective Choice," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 94(1), pages 73-88, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Le Breton, Michel & Montero, Maria & Zaporozhets, Vera, 2012. "Voting power in the EU council of ministers and fair decision making in distributive politics," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 63(2), pages 159-173.
    2. Eraslan, Hülya & McLennan, Andrew, 2013. "Uniqueness of stationary equilibrium payoffs in coalitional bargaining," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 148(6), pages 2195-2222.
    3. Drouvelis, Michalis & Montero, Maria & Sefton, Martin, 2010. "Gaining power through enlargement: Strategic foundations and experimental evidence," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 69(2), pages 274-292, July.
    4. Le Breton, Michel & Montero, Maria & Zaporozhets, Vera, 2012. "Voting power in the EU council of ministers and fair decision making in distributive politics," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 63(2), pages 159-173.
    5. Michalis Drouvelis & Maria Montero & Martin Sefton, 2007. "The Paradox of New Members: Strategic Foundations and Experimental Evidence," Discussion Papers 2007-06, The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Maria Montero, 2007. "The Paradox of New Members in the Council of Ministers: A Noncooperative Approach," Discussion Papers 2007-12, The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham.
    2. Le Breton, Michel & Montero, Maria & Zaporozhets, Vera, 2012. "Voting power in the EU council of ministers and fair decision making in distributive politics," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 63(2), pages 159-173.
    3. Drouvelis, Michalis & Montero, Maria & Sefton, Martin, 2010. "Gaining power through enlargement: Strategic foundations and experimental evidence," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 69(2), pages 274-292, July.
    4. Le Breton, Michel & Montero, Maria & Zaporozhets, Vera, 2012. "Voting power in the EU council of ministers and fair decision making in distributive politics," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 63(2), pages 159-173.
    5. Eric Guerci & Nobuyuki Hanaki & Naoki Watanabe & Gabriele Esposito & Xiaoyan Lu, 2014. "A methodological note on a weighted voting experiment," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 43(4), pages 827-850, December.
    6. Eric Guerci & Nobuyuki Hanaki & Naoki Watanabe & Gabriele Esposito & Xiaoyan Lu, 2011. "A Note on a Weighted Voting Experiment: Human Mistakes in Cooperative Games," Working Papers halshs-00645867, HAL.
    7. Seok-ju Cho & John Duggan, 2015. "A folk theorem for the one-dimensional spatial bargaining model," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 44(4), pages 933-948, November.
    8. de Groot Ruiz, Adrian & Ramer, Roald & Schram, Arthur, 2016. "Formal versus informal legislative bargaining," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 96(C), pages 1-17.
    9. Maria Montero, 2023. "Bargaining in Legislatures: A New Donation Paradox," Studies in Choice and Welfare, in: Sascha Kurz & Nicola Maaser & Alexander Mayer (ed.), Advances in Collective Decision Making, pages 159-171, Springer.
    10. Eraslan, Hülya & Merlo, Antonio, 2017. "Some unpleasant bargaining arithmetic?," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 171(C), pages 293-315.
    11. Toshiji Miyakawa, 2009. "Existence and efficiency of a stationary subgame-perfect equilibrium in coalitional bargaining models with nonsuperadditive payoffs," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 39(2), pages 291-306, May.
    12. Herings, P. Jean-Jacques & Meshalkin, Andrey & Predtetchinski, Arkadi, 2018. "Subgame perfect equilibria in majoritarian bargaining," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 101-112.
    13. Kim, Duk Gyoo, 2019. "Recognition without replacement in legislative bargaining," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 161-175.
    14. Zapal, Jan, 2020. "Simple Markovian equilibria in dynamic spatial legislative bargaining," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 63(C).
    15. Le Breton, Michel & Lepelley, Dominique & Macé, Antonin & Merlin, Vincent, 2017. "Le mécanisme optimal de vote au sein du conseil des représentants d’un système fédéral," L'Actualité Economique, Société Canadienne de Science Economique, vol. 93(1-2), pages 203-248, Mars-Juin.
    16. Zaporozhets, Vera, 2015. "Power Distribution in French River Basin Committees," TSE Working Papers 15-558, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    17. Le Breton, Michel & Thomas, Alban & Zaporozhets, Vera, 2012. "Bargaining in River Basin Committees: Rules Versus Discretion," LERNA Working Papers 12.12.369, LERNA, University of Toulouse.
    18. Akira Okada, 2015. "Cooperation and Institution in Games," The Japanese Economic Review, Japanese Economic Association, vol. 66(1), pages 1-32, March.
    19. Eric Guerci & Nobuyuki Hanaki & Naoki Watanabe, 2017. "Meaningful learning in weighted voting games: an experiment," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 83(1), pages 131-153, June.
    20. Maria Montero, 2010. "Bargaining in Legislatures: A New Donation Paradox," Discussion Papers 2010-19, The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    legislative bargaining; weighted voting; power measures; EU enlargement; paradox of new members;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C71 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Cooperative Games
    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
    • C78 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Bargaining Theory; Matching Theory

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:not:notcdx:2007-12. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jose V Guinot Saporta (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cdnotuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.