Abstract
We analyze democratic equity in council voting games (CVGs). In a CVG, a voting body containing all members delegates decision-making to a (time-varying) subset of its members, as describes, e.g., the relationship between the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). We develop a theoretical framework for analyzing democratic equitability in CVGs at both the country and region levels, and for different assumptions regarding preference correlation. We apply the framework to evaluate the equitability of the UNSC, and the claims of those who seek to reform it. We find that the individual permanent members are overrepresented by between 21.3 times (United Kingdom) and 3.8 times (China) from a country-level perspective, while from a region perspective Eastern Europe is the most heavily overrepresented region with more than twice its equitable representation, and Africa the most heavily underrepresented. Our equity measures do not preclude some UNSC members from exercising veto rights, however.
Highlights
Decision-making within international organizations is sometimes made by voting bodies that comprise a proper subset of the membership (a ‘‘council’’)
Our proximity measures under uncorrelated preferences (UC) preferences are found as kCEsk 1⁄4 0:38; kCEwk 1⁄4 0:51; kREk 1⁄4 0:65: The maximum deviation is observed to be from strong country expected voting power (EVP)
Part of this inequity owes to the two-year term length of a Non-Permanent Member (NPM), which implies that countries half-way through their terms are assigned to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) with probability one
Summary
Decision-making within international organizations is sometimes made by voting bodies that comprise a proper subset of the membership (a ‘‘council’’). In the second (international) stage, countries vote ‘‘for’’ or ‘‘against’’ according to their national mandates and the outcome space is {pass, fail} We generalize this process in three ways. Our basic normative notion of democratic equity—the equalization of expected voting power (EVP) criterion—requires that every citizen have the same voting power (in expectation) over outcomes in the council, before the assignment of countries to the council is known.4 This concept of equity, reflects both a country’s voting rights when serving as a council member, and how often it is a council member. Our regional equity concept shows that Africa is the most underrepresented region with only around one-third of its equitable voting power, while Eastern Europe is the most overrepresented with just over double its equitable representation These findings suggest a case for a reallocation of the seats given to each region, and our notion of country equity is prescriptive in this regard.
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