Felsenthal, Dan S. (1938-)

Dan S. Felsenthal received his BA and MA degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJ) and his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in political science. He began his teaching career at HUJ but moved in 1973 to the University of Haifa, becoming professor emeritus in 2003. Since 2001, he has been codirector of the Voting Power and Procedures (VPP) Programme at London School of Economics and Political Science.

[Page 246]Felsenthal's early work focused on coalition theory, organization studies, and decision making. His early collaborators include Amnon Rapoport, Zeev Maoz, and Abraham Diskin. In 1976, Felsenthal published a two-volume treatise on Mathematics for Administrative Decision Makers (in Hebrew). He was also one of the pioneers of experimentation in political science.

After the early 1980s, Felsenthal's repertoire expanded to include theoretical and applied social choice theory, which has remained his forte ever since. In 1990, he published Topics in Social Choice: Sophisticated Voting, Efficacy, and Proportional Representation. His works on strategic voting under various procedures—including varieties of approval and cumulative voting—have been particularly significant.

In contrast to most experts on applied social choice theory, Felsenthal has studied proportional representation systems along with the single-winner systems.

Since the mid-1990s, his principal coworker has been Moshé Machover, with whom Felsenthal has made fundamental contributions to the theory of voting power measurement. Indeed, no serious student of voting power can ignore their magnum opus, The Measurement of Voting Power: Theory and Practice, Problems and Paradoxes. It provides a thorough history of voting power measurement, introduces the classic a priori measures of voting power, and makes the thought-provoking distinction between I-power and P-power. In contradistinction to earlier power studies, their work also deals with ternary voting games—voting settings where the voters have three options: yes, no, or abstain. Various paradoxes of voting power are also discussed in the book. In the authors' opinion, these are mostly apparent rather than really significant aspects of power indices.

Felsenthal and Machover have played an important role in the scholarly debate on the status and reform of the decision-making institutions of the European Union. They have been particularly concerned about the possibility of institutional paralysis as a result of applying a decision-making apparatus designed for a 12-member community to the present 27-member union. With the European Union remaining in flux with continual changes to its constitution and size, the debate on the decision rules of the union will continue indefinitely.