Today, the EU is no longer a mere union of states, but more and more a union of citizens. Nevertheless, European decisions are still taken almost exclusively by the states. The role of the elected European Parliament as a source of direct legitimation is underdeveloped. This role has to be further strengthened if we are to overcome the democratic deficit of the Union-through more decision-makin...

Given any allocation of parliament seats among parties, we characterize all the stable government configurations (supported by at least a majority of the parliament) in terms of winning coalitions and policy outcomes. We consider a two dimensional policy space and we assume that there are four parties that care mainly about holding office, and only instrumentally about policy. We find that for ...

A party is dominant if there is a majority coalition to which that party belongs such that it affords this party more possibilities to form an alternative winning coalition than any of the other members of the coalition (see Peleg [1980, 1981]). In this article I present empirical evidence showing that an allocation of seats in a parliament is biased toward the high frequency occurrence of a do...