Measuring voting power in an international institution: the United States and the inter-American development bank |
| |
Authors: | Jonathan R. Strand |
| |
Affiliation: | (1) Department of Political Science University of Nevada, Las Vegas Las Vegas, NV 89154-5029, USA (e-mail: strand@unlv.edu) , US |
| |
Abstract: | This paper applies a measure of relative voting power to the weighted voting system of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). Almost all assessments of internal governance of the IADB and other international financial institutions make reference to members' votes as a proxy for relative influence. But as this paper demonstrates, voting weights are misleading. The number of votes a country has in a weighted voting system does not necessarily denote its ability to affect outcomes. The conventional wisdom holds that the United States is omnipotent in the IADB because it has a large number (over 30 percent) of all the votes. This paper reveals that the U.S. obtains much more control over outcomes than originally intended by the institutions' designers. Received: September 2000 / Accepted: October 2001 |
| |
Keywords: | : weighted voting a priori voting power Inter-American Development Bank Johnston power index |
本文献已被 SpringerLink 等数据库收录! |