Power distribution in the Basque Parliament using games with externalities

Abstract

In this paper we study the distribution of power in the Basque Parliament since the restoration of the Spanish democracy. The classic simple games do not fit with the particular voting rule that it is used to invest the president of the regional government. In order to model this voting mechanism we incorporate coalitional externalities to the game. We use the extensions of the most popular power indices to games with externalities that have been proposed in the most recent literature. Moreover, we propose a method to estimate the probability of a given coalition based on the ideological positions of its members in a two-dimensional political spectrum.