06-335 Werner Kirsch

On Penrose's square-root law and beyond (291K, pdf) Nov 17, 06

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Abstract. In certain bodies, like the Council of the EU, the member states have a voting weight which depends on the population of the re- spective state. In this article we ask the question which voting weight guarantees a `fair' representation of the citizens in the union. The tra- ditional answer, the square-root law by Penrose, is that the weight of a state (more precisely: the voting power) should be proportional to the square-root of the population of this state. The square root law is based on the assumption that the voters in every state cast their vote inde- pendently of each other. In this paper we concentrate on cases where the independence assumption is not valid.

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