Power distribution in the Weimar Reichstag in 1919-1933

摘要

We present an analysis of the distribution of voting power in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic based on the outcomes of the nine general elections in the period 1919-1933. The paper contains a brief description of the political and electoral system of the Weimar Republic and a characterization of the main political actors and their political views. The power distributions are evaluated by means of the Banzhaf index and two new indices which take into account the parties' preferences to coalesce. A model is constructed to evaluate the parties' preferences with reference to the closeness of the ideological positions in a one-dimensional political space.