A THEORY OF DECISIONAL POWER.

The concept of decisional power is introduced and compared with other measures for power like those of Shapley-Shubik, Banzhaf and Dahl. The sum of the powers of all actors in a social network is maximal for certain structures of the network. These structures are called completely democratic. Completely democratic structures are characterized. In every network dictator sets are present. These can be found by use of Boole polynomials. Decisional power turns out to have both a causal aspect and a utility aspect and to allow for variations that express the power over other persons as well as the power in a certain state of the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]