Strategic versus non-strategic voting power in the EU Council of Ministers: the consultation procedure

This article evaluates the distribution of power within the Council of the European Union from the a priori perspective of constitutional design using two distinct approaches: (1) applying traditional voting power indices; (2) carrying out strategic equilibrium analysis of the EU’s consultation procedure. It clarifies why both approaches lead to different power indications, and investigates the determinants of the differences’ magnitudes. Depending on one’s assumptions about behavior of the consultation procedure’s agenda setter, the European Commission, traditional indices turn out to deliver a good approximation also of relative strategic power in the Council.     

A note on the paradox of smaller coalitions

We consider hedonic coalition formation games that are induced by a simple TU-game and a cooperative solution. For such models, Shenoy’s (Int J Game Theory 8:133–164, 1979) absence of the paradox of smaller coalitions provides a sufficient condition for core existence. We present three different versions of his condition in order to compare it to the top coalition property of Banerjee et al. (Social Choice Welfare 18:135–153, 2001) that guarantees nonemptiness of the core in more general models. As it turns out, the top coalition property implies a condition in which Shenoy’s paradox is not present for at least one minimal winning coalition. Conversely, if for each non-null player Shenoy’s paradox is not present for at least one minimal winning coalition containing that player, then the induced hedonic game satisfies the top coalition property.     

An extension of Bowen’s dynamic voting rule to many dimensions

 We ask in this paper about the effect on social decisions of limiting the size of changes that voters may propose each time in an otherwise standard dynamic social choice model. The voting rule we study can be seen as an extension of Bowen’s dynamic “majority voting” rule, and is closely related to the dynamic procedures for public good allocation in the literature (Drèze and de la Vallée Poussin 1971; Malinvaud 1971; Laffont and Maskin 1983; Chander 1993). Under general assumptions we prove existence and Pareto efficiency of equilibrium, and show that our rule motivates voters not to misrepresent preferences (more precisely, the rule is Strongly Locally Individually Incentive Compatible). Under Euclidean preferences we find that electoral cycles do not arise (i.e., the rule is convergent), that there is a unique equilibrium, and that the equilibrium coincides with the solution to an old problem of geometry, first addressed by Fermat, Torricelli, and Cavallieri. Received: 20 September 1994/Accepted: 6 August 1996     

Endogenous Voting Agendas

Existence of a “simple” pure strategy subgame perfect equilibrium is established in a model of endogenous agenda formation and sophisticated voting; upper hemicontinuity of simple equilibrium outcomes is demonstrated; and connections to the set of undominated, or “core,” alternatives are examined. In one dimension with single-peaked preferences, the simple equilibrium outcome is essentially unique and lies in the core, providing a game-theoretic foundation for the median voter theorem in terms of endogenous agenda setting. Existence of equilibrium relies on a general characterization of sophisticated voting outcomes in the presence of “majority-ties,” rather than the standard tie-breaking convention in voting subgames in favor of the alternative proposed later. The model is illustrated in a three-agent distributive politics setting, and it is shown there that the standard tie-breaking convention leads to non-existence of equilibrium.     

On the structure of minimal winning coalitions in simple voting games

According to Coleman’s index of collective power, a decision rule that generates a larger number of winning coalitions imparts the collectivity a higher a priori power to act. By the virtue of the monotonicity conditions, a decision rule is totally characterized by the set of minimal winning coalitions. In this paper, we investigate the structure of the families of minimal winning coalitions corresponding to maximal and proper simple voting games (SVG). We show that if the proper and maximal SVG is swap robust and all the minimal winning coalitions are of the same size, then the SVG is a specific (up to an isomorphism) system. We also provide examples of proper SVGs to show that the number of winning coalitions is not monotone with respect to the intuitively appealing system parameters like the number of blockers, number of non-dummies or the size of the minimal blocking set.     

Toward a reflexive sociology

Gouldner’s call for a “reflexive sociology” in 1970 remains a largely unexamined idea, yet with the breakdown of functionalism’s begemony and the present ferment in theory its time may finally have come. In attempting to clarify and reconstruct Gouldner’s idea, I begin with his concepts “background assumptions” and “domain assumptions,” linking them with Kubn’s ideas. Employing levels of abstraction to approach Gouldner’s material systematically, I proceed to develop and illustrate two contrasting background assumptions or world hypotheses: “stratification” and “interaction.” Finally, I examine some methodological implications of these world views, centering on defining problems, ratio scales and images of measurement, sampling and multivariate-analysis procedures. Introduced to sociology by C. Wright Mills, Bernard Phillips studied with Robin N. Williams, Jr. and taught at the University of North Carolina and the University of Illinois (where he overlapped with Alvin W. Gouldner for a year) before coming to Boston University. A cofounder of the ASA section, Sociological Practice, Phillips’ interests are in Societal Change, Theory and Methods.     

A time series of urban forestry in Los Angeles

There has been an increasing interest in the evolution of urban forests. This research uses historic and digital aerial photography to quantify changes in tree density in Los Angeles, California since the 1920’s. High-resolution geographic information system analysis (4 to 6 time periods) of three regions (San Fernando Valley, Hollywood, Los Angeles Basin) of Los Angeles reveals that there has not always been an increase in tree density with time. Tree densities on public and private land were highest in the 1940’s in Hollywood, while the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles Basin experienced a near linear increase in tree density on both private and public land since the 1920’s. When historic tree density reconstructions were examined for the 15 Los Angeles city council districts from the 1920’s, 1950’s and 2006, most districts in Los Angeles have experienced a significant increase in tree density, however, there has been wide variation in tree densities among city council districts. Trees densities have generally been higher on private land since the 1920’s and currently tree densities on private land are significantly higher than on public land. Results suggest the evolution of urban forests in Los Angeles mirrors the dynamics of urban forests in desert and grassland cities. It is possible to reconstruct the development of urban forests in sections of cities using historic and contemporary aerial photography. We estimated that Los Angeles averages approximately 104 trees per hectare (82 private land, 22 public land) based on 2006 imagery at 0.3 m resolution, however, field validation suggests that we identified only 73% of trees. Although there is still space to plant trees on public land, private land owners will need to be heavily involved in order to achieve the goals of Los Angeles’ Million Tree Initiative.     

Export Performance,Labor Standards and Institutions: Evidence from a Dynamic Panel Data Model

I investigate the role of labor standards in international trade. While the literature has used many different measures of labor standards, I use two: the rate of work injuries and the rate of strikes and lockouts — allowing me to construct both measures for 112 countries from 1980 until 2004. This allows dynamic panel data methods to be used in estimation. Three measures of the quality of institutions are also used for the same period: the number of years the chief executive is in office, the concentration of a country’s legislature measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, and whether the legislature is controlled by a party representing a special interest. The results show that countries with better labor standards and institutions do trade more — their exports to GDP ratio is higher.     

A Geometric Study of Shareholders’ Voting in Incomplete Markets: Multivariate Median and Mean Shareholder Theorems

A simple parametric general equilibrium model with S states of nature and K < S firms is considered. Since markets are incomplete, at a (financial) equilibrium shareholders typically disagree on whether to keep or not the status quo production plans. Hence each firm faces a genuine problem of social choice. The setup proposed in the present paper allows to study these problems within a classical (Downsian) spatial voting model. Given the multidimensional nature of the latter, super majority rules with rate are needed to guarantee existence of politically stable production plans. A simple geometric argument is proposed showing why a 50%-majority stable production equilibrium exists when K=S−1. When the degree of incompleteness is more severe, under more restrictive assumptions on agents’ preferences and the distribution of agents’ types, equilibria are shown to exist for rates ρ smaller than Caplin and Nalebuff (Econometrica 59: 1–23, 1991) bound of 0.64: they obtain for production plans whose span contains the ‘ideal securities’ of all K mean shareholders.Hervé Crès is a member of the GREGHEC, unité CNRS, UMR 2959.     

Voting power: an information theory approach

In recent years, there has been increasing awareness of the importance of formal measures of voting power and of the relevance of such measures to real life political issues. Nevertheless, existing measures have been criticized, especially because of their dependence on the unrealistic assumption that different coalitions have equal probabilities. In this paper we show that the classical problem of measuring voting power can be naturally embedded in information theory. This perspective on voting power allows us to extend measures of voting power to cases in which there are dependencies among voters. In doing so, we distinguish between two different notions of a given voter’s power—‘control’ and ‘informativeness’—corresponding, respectively, to the average uncertainty regarding the outcome of a vote that remains when all others have voted and the average uncertainty that is eliminated when only the given voter has voted. This distinction settles a number of well-known paradoxes and enables the study of voting power on the basis of actual political behavior at all levels.     

Agenda control in coalition formation

Theoretical models of government formation in political science usually assume that the head of state is non-strategic. In this paper, we analyze the power of an agenda setter who chooses the order in which players are recognized to form coalitions in simple games. We characterize those sets of players which can be imposed in the equilibrium coalition and show that the only decisive structures where the agenda setter can impose the presence of any minimal winning coalition are apex games, where a large player forms a winning coalition with any of the small players. Keywords: Government Formation, Agenda Control, Coalitional Bargaining, Finite Bargaining Rules. Received: 26 January 2001/Accepted: 31 July 2001     

Reflections on public sociology: Public relations, disciplinary identity, and the strong program in professional sociology

Public sociology is an attempt to redress the issues of public engagement and disciplinary identity that have beset the discipline over the past several decades. While public sociology seeks to rectify the public invisibility of sociology, this paper investigates the limitations of it program. Several points of critique are offered. First, public sociology's affiliations with Marxism serve to potentially entrench existing divisions within the discipline. Second, public sociology's advancement of an agenda geared toward a “sociology for publics” instead of a “sociology of publics” imposes limitations on the development of a public interface. Third, the lack of a methodological agenda for public sociology raises concerns of how sociology can compete within a contested climate of public opinion. Fourth, issues of disciplinary coherence are not necessarily resolved by public sociology, and are potentially exacerbated by the invocation of public sociology as a new disciplinary identity. Fifth, the incoherence of professional sociology is obviated, and a misleading affiliation is made between scientific knowledge and the hegemonic structure of the profession. Finally, the idealism of public sociology's putative defense of civil society is explored as a Utopian gesture akin to that of Habermas’ attempt to revive the public sphere. The development of a strong program in professional sociology is briefly offered as a means to repair the disciplinary problems that are illustrated by emergence of the project of public sociology.     

Disunity within the house of labor: Change to win or to stay the course?

In September 2005, six unions representing 5.4 million workers held their founding convention as a new federation independent of the AFL-CIO. Infelicitously named “Change to Win Federation” (CTWF), the new alliance has called for a rededication of union resources and energies towards organizing the unorganized. Although CTWF has occasioned considerable interest and speculation among labor supporters and observers, it is difficult to determine why the break occurred, other than, perhaps, the personal agenda of some of its leaders. An unstated, significant reason may be a desire on the rebels’ part to operate relatively free of “noraiding” strictures of the AFL-CIO, even though the group disclaims any interest in challenging existing bargaining relationships and has penned “solidarity pacts” with some of its principal AFL-CIO competitors and with state and local units of the federation. Competitive forces are missing in the market for workplace representation services. The new group may reignite the rival unionism that spurred organized labor’s marked growth from 1935–1954, but early returns suggest an emphasis on militant posturing and on trendy, implausible themes such as “global unionism” and “subcontracting out strikes.”     

Employee privacy and the “theory of the firm”

Bruce Kobayashi and Larry Ribstein apply the “theory of the firm” to worker privacy with specific application to the employer’s ability to monitor employee performance and behavior. They take the theory to drive toward a much reduced role for law in favor of regulation by contract. This essay unpacks their theory. It faults the theory for its failure to come to grips with the possibility of monopsony in the labor market, its failure to appreciate the “public goods” nature of privacy policies and the related assumption that the employer’s ability to adopt and apply privacyinvasive policies is invariably a product of a consensual armslength bargain. This essay is revised and expanded from the author’s Introduction to the 2003 Supplement to Matthew Finkin, Privacy in Employment Law (2d ed. 2003) 2003 Supplement.     

Picking Winners? Evidence on NATO’s Enlargement Strategy

The effectiveness of NATO conditionality for institutional reforms is highly controversial. Some papers argue that any effect this conditionality might have had may be due to endogeneity effects, i.e. NATO may have picked the winners. We argue that this is not the case. First, NATO-Mazedonia relations provide a case in point. Macedonia was granted entry into the Membership Action Plan (MAP) in 1999 due to country’s strategic importance. Only after the Ohrid agreement, effective conditionality set in and marked a switch in NATO strategy from security only towards institution building. Second, this is supported by econometric evidence based on panel data. An event study reveals that entry into NATO’s accession process was mainly driven by neighbourhood and good relations with the West. We conclude that empirical evidence clearly supports a stronger role of NATO’s political agenda, i.e., low entry barriers but strict accession conditionality.     

Objective measures of well-being and the cooperative production problem

 The concern for measuring well-being objectively (as opposed to subjectively, that is, relying only on preferences) is found in modern political philosophy, especially in J. Rawls’s, A. Sen’s and G. Cohen’s writings. This paper explains the implications of using an objective well-being index as equalisandum or, close to the so-called “safety net preoccupation”, to guarantee a well-being lower bound. In the simple production model studied here, five characterization results and two related theorems prove the convergence of both approaches. We come to the conclusion that the Proportional Solution is the dominant solution according to “objectivist” axioms. Received: 5 September 1994/Accepted: 29 June 1996     

Using Analytic Space: A Challenge to Contemporary Psychoanalysis

As psychoanalysts, we have to be constantly aware of the impact of external reality upon the analytic process, whether this comes from the world outside the consulting room or from within it. In particular, I am concerned with the disturbing influence that may come from the analyst’s devotion to new theoretical positions and ways of working. Also we cannot prescribe ‘good experience’ for any patient. We can only follow the process, and this may require of us that we survive being used by the patient to represent all that has been worst in the patient’s life. We should never deflect that.     

A piece of lost history: Max Weber and Lowell L. Bennion

This article discussesMax Weber’s Methodology, Lowell L. Bennion’s (1933) published doctoral dissertation from the University of Strasbourg, France. This book is important because it is the first systematic English language treatment of Weber’s work. It also suggests an early link between Weberian and Durkheimian scholarship and foreshadows later debates regarding Talcott Parsons’ interpretation of Weber. Additionally the book provides a unique contribution by applying Weber’s “Calvinism-Capitalism” thesis to the development of Mormonism. We explore the academic context in which the book was written and its reception by American sociologists at the time. After summarizing the text, we examine its perspective on the issues later raised about Parsons’ account of Weber. We conclude by looking at Lowell Bennion as a sociologist and a devout Mormon, and the unique connection that he forged between his religion and Max Weber’s ideas. Her field is organizational behavior and theory; her primary area of research is the relationship between organizational hierarchy and managerial leadership. He is currently investigating the modes of white collar resistance in public bureaucracies.     

Enduring Legacy? Charles Tilly and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Durable Inequality</Emphasis>

This article assesses Charles Tilly’s Durable Inequality and traces its influence. In writing Durable Inequality, Tilly sought to shift the research agenda of stratification scholars. But the book’s initial impact was disappointing. In recent years, however, its influence has grown, suggesting a more enduring legacy.     

Aggregation of binary evaluations for truth-functional agendas

In the problem of judgment aggregation, a panel of judges has to evaluate each proposition in a given agenda as true or false, based on their individual evaluations and subject to the constraint of logical consistency. We elaborate on the relation between this and the problem of aggregating abstract binary evaluations. For the special case of truth-functional agendas we have the following main contributions: (1) a syntactical characterization of agendas for which the analogs of Arrow’s aggregation conditions force dictatorship; (2) a complete classification of all aggregators that satisfy those conditions; (3) an analysis of the effect of weakening the Pareto condition to surjectivity. This is a sequel to the paper “Aggregation of binary evaluations.” The contents of both papers were presented, under the title “An Arrovian impossibility theorem for social truth functions,” at the Second World Congress of the Game Theory Society, Marseille, July 2004. The first version of “Aggregation of binary evaluations” was completed in June 2005. That working paper was subsequently split into two parts, of which this is the second. The comments of an anonymous referee are gratefully acknowledged. Part of R. Holzman’s work was done while he was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.