The Uncertainty in Voting Power: The Case of the Czech Parliament 1996–2004

The main aim of this paper is to study the power of legislators in the Lower House of the Czech Parliament in 1996–2004 with respect to power distribution and its uncertainty. A discrepancy between a-priori computed power indices and outcome of voting leads to necessity to reveal the possible source of uncertainty. This paper studies uncertainty in party loyalty, presence and creation of hidden coalitions and explains the addition of these uncertainty issues to computation of power indices. Recalculated power indices exhibit positive improvement.