Spatial power indices with applications on real voting data from the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Parliament

Abstract

Participants in parliamentary voting—usually political parties—are evaluated with a value that assigns them predicted power with respect to their strength by so called power indices. However, in real world, political parties’ representatives act not strictly as predicted in theory. One possibility how the representatives differ from theory is the way they form coalitions; the coalitions can be announced (for example official governmental coalition parties in multiparty parliaments) or hidden. To incorporate the coalition forming influence, Bilal et al. (http://aei.pitt.edu/2052/1/001591_1.pdf, 2001) proposed to consider additional weights to possible coalitions into power indices. This article applies the concept of additional weights to calculate an ex post power distribution using Shapley–Shubik power index together with Banzhaf power index on real voting data, namely the data from the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Parliament with the emphasis on the State Budget voting issues during 2006–2010 parliamentary period.