Abstract We present an analysis of the distribution of voting power in the Reichstag of
the Weimar Republic based on the outcomes of the nine general elections in the period
1919–1933. The paper contains a brief description of the political and electoral system of
the Weimar Republic and a characterization of the main political actors and their political
views. The power distributions are evaluated by means of the Banzhaf index and two new indices
which take into account the parties’ preferences to coalesce. A model is constructed to
evaluate the parties’ preferences with reference to the closeness of the ideological positions
in a one-dimensional political space.
Keywords Power distribution · Preferences · Reichstag · Weimar Republic
