ABSTRACT
The measures of bargaining strength (BS1 and BS2) that I illustrated in section 7.12 were developed to assess the power of political parties in a parliamentary system using coalition voting. In this chapter I shall propose a measure of bargaining power that is not specific to any particular institutional arrangements but rather, in fact, quite general. After distinguishing it from another well-known measure of power, I shall use it to compare the power of representatives, senators, and the president in the U.S. federal system.
