New Chairman Paradoxes

Power is one of the most alluring but also one of the most intractable concepts in political science. It leads to a number of paradoxes (Brams, 1976, ch. 7), which continue to manifest themselves in real-life voting bodies like the European Community Council of Ministers (Brams and Affuso, 1985; Brams, 1985: 101–104). For example, one implication of some definitions of power is that the greater proportion of resources (such as votes) that an actor controls, the greater is his power. In this paper, we shall show that this implication in a certain context may be false.