La détermination du nombre des délégués au sein des structures intercommunales : une application de l'indice de pouvoir de Banzhaf

We investigate in this paper the representation of the cities inside the french local entities called E.P.C.I. (Etablissement Public de Coopération Intercommunale). In these entities, each city is represented by a given number of delegates. Our analysis focuses on E.PC.I.s from Basse-Normandie and is based upon the notion of voting power index (in the sense of Banzhaf), borrowed from cooperative game theory. Our calculations take into account the fact that some coalitions are more likely to occur than others. It turns out that the voting power of cities is often different from their relative size, as measured by their population. We finally propose an algorithm allowing the determination of the « optimal » number of delegates for each city. Classification JEL : D7.