Freedom and Voting Power

Abstract

This paper develops the symmetric power order, a measure of voting power for multicandidate elections. The measure generalizes standard pivotality-based voting power measures for binary elections, such as Banzhaf power. At the same time, the measure is not based on pivotality, but rather on a measure of freedom of choice in individual decisions. Indeed, I use the symmetric power order to show that pivotality only measures voting power in monotonic elections, and is not a good measure in multicandidate elections. Pivotality only provides an upper bound on voting power. This result establishes a relation between voting power and strategy-proofness.