RECONCILING POWER AND EQUALITY IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS: A VOTING METHOD FROM RABBI KROCHMAL OF KREMSIER

Organizations whose members are national governments face a problem in their choice of a voting mechanism: they need sys tems that recognize the greater power and contribution of the larger members while preserving some influence for the smaller ones. Voting by count and account is suggested here as providing a good compromise between power and equality. It avoids certain surprising and counterintuitive results produced by other systems that international bodies now use, such as basic votes. At the or ganization 's founding it is easy to negotiate and it also symbol izes the accepted status relationships in an international body better than current methods do, thus giving a vote more legiti macy. For international organizations, it is the natural analogue of a two-house system. The reasons that a Jewish community in Moravia in the seventeenth century used it seem to be similar to those that make it appropriate for international organizations to day.