VPP was founded in November 2000 at LSE's Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS). The following year it was awarded a research interchange grant by The Leverhulme Trust| to support the development of the field of the measurement of voting power with particular emphasis on the problem of designing of a system of weighted voting in the EU's Council of Ministers. This grant, which funded annual VPP workshops and director's meetings over three years commencing January 2002, was crucial in the rapid development of VPP to become the international centre for voting power research.
In summary, VPP research seeks to address the following issues:
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To assess continually the theory of the measurement of voting power, both a priori and actual with a view to further development
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To consider where conceptual criteria might be devised and refined for assessing decision rules from various viewpoints such as equitability, majoritarianism and compliancy
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To consider where existing computational algorithms might be refined and new ones might be developed that are needed for applications - in particular, where new algorithms will enable the design of weighted voting systems which have certain given desirable properties, such as equality of voting power among citizens of different nations
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To consider how the theoretical, conceptual and computational tools as described above might be applied to the assessment of actual and proposed decision rules
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To disseminate the results of our research in a practical and non-technical manner to inform, train and to interact with decision makers and their advisers, opinion formers, journalists and media, and the general public.