The Measurement of Voting Power as a Special Case of the Measurement of Political Power

Felsenthal and Machover have made substantial contributions to the measurement of voting power. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that the notion of political power is actually a quite general one of which voting power is one instantiation. In this brief paper, we consider political power in the general sense and propose a definition. We will show that when applied specifically to voting power, our definition is a generalization of Banzhaf’s definition.