Equitable representation in councils: theory and an application to the United Nations Security Council

We analyze democratic equity in council voting games (CVGs). In a CVG, a body containing all members delegates decision-making to a (time-varying) subset its members, as describes, e.g., the relationship between the United Nations General and the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). We develop a theoretical for analyzing democratic equitability in CVGs at both the country and region , and for different assumptions regarding preference correlation. We apply the to evaluate the equitability of the UNSC, and the claims of those who seek to it. We find that the individual permanent members are overrepresented by between 21.3 times (United Kingdom) and 3.8 times (China) from a country-level perspective, from a region perspective Eastern Europe is the most heavily overrepresented region more than twice its equitable representation, and Africa the most heavily underrepresented. equity measures do not preclude some UNSC members from exercising veto , however.