Electing the Pope

Arbeitspapier

Few elections attract so much attention as the Papal Conclave that elects the religious leader of over a billion Catholics worldwide. The Conclave is an interesting case of qualified majority voting with many participants and no formal voting blocks. Each cardinal is a well-known public gure with publicly available personal data and well-known positions on public matters. This provides excellent grounds for a study of spatial voting: In this brief note we study voting in the Papal Conclave after the resignation of Benedict XVI. We describe the method of the election and based on a simple estimation of certain factors that seem to influence the electors' preferences we calculate the power of each cardinal in the conclave as the Shapley-Shubik index of the corresponding voting game over a convex geometry.

Object Details

• ISBN: 978-615-5243-72-1
• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IEHAS Discussion Papers ; No. MT-DP - 2013/15

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Cooperative Games ; Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
• Subject: Papal Conclave ; game over convexge-ometry ; Shapley-Shubik index ; Geistliche ; Katholizismus ; Wahl ; Wahlverhalten ; Koalition ; Spieltheorie ; Shapley-Wert

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Kóczy, László Á. ; Sziklai, Balázs
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies
• (where): Budapest
• (when): 2013

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/108295
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET