Apportionment of Votes
| System | Brazil | Indonesia | United States | India | China |
| Schwartzberg's weighted voting | 1.91% | 1.38% | 9.07% | 5.96% | 7.67% |
| Provisional People's Assembly method | 2.22% | 1.71%* | 6.15% | 5.64% | 3.25%** |
| One person, one vote | 2.81% | 3.47% | 4.55% | 17.52% | 19.82% |
| Penrose method | 1.84% | 2.05% | 2.34% | 4.60% | 4.89% |
| One state, one vote | 0.52% | 0.52% | 0.52% | 0.52% | 0.52% |
| *Due to "Partially free" status. **Due to "Not free" status. | |||||
A global parliamentary assembly could be structured to give populous states greater influence. The one state, one vote rule of the UN General Assembly gives small states a disproportionate amount of influence over the UN system. In Entitlement quotients as a vehicle for United Nations reform, University of Minnesota professor emeritus Joseph E. Schwartzberg notes, "The sixty-four least populous members–enough to block a two-thirds majority vote–comprise less than one percent of the world's total population! And, in theory, the 127 least populous members, accounting for barely eight percent of humanity, are enough to provide the two-thirds majority needed to pass a substantive resolution." He continues this point in his essay, Overcoming Practical Difficulties in Creating a World Parliamentary Assembly:
| “ | the disparities in populations among members of the UN are so much greater than those of units represented in any national legislature as to make a second house analogous to the US Senate an impractical recommendation. To comprehend this point, note that California, the most populous state in the United States, has 69 times the population of Wyoming the least populous state, whereas, the most populous member of the UN, has more than 100,000 times the population of Nauru or Tuvalu, the two least populous members (each with barely more 10,000 inhabitants). While California has 52 seats in the House of Representatives, compared to Wyoming’s one, both have two seats in the Senate. But who would argue that Nauru should have as much power ... as China? | ” |
There are several alternate proposals for apportionment of votes among member nations.
Schwartzberg's weighted voting formula takes into account population (the democratic/demographic principle), contribution to the UN budget (the economic principle), and share of the total membership. The idea of weighting countries' votes according to their financial contribution to the organization is not unprecedented, as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and other Bretton Woods institutions use this method.
The Provisional People's Assembly's methodology gives each nation Population Seats based on a calculation that combines the Penrose method, Economic Seats equal to its portion of the world's total gross domestic product, and classification as Free, Partially Free, or Unfree by Freedom House.
Under one person, one vote, each country's number of votes is directly proportional to its population. This would be similar to how U.S. states are represented in the United States House of Representatives. In The Future of Sovereignty - Rethinking a Key Concept of International Relations, Hasenclever et al. sum up the advantages and disadvantages of this system: "In a strict meaning of democracy based on individuals as subjects, every person's vote would have to have exactly the same weight. None of the known proposals, however, supports such a strict interpretation, because the inequality among the states' voting powers would be extreme with only four countries - China, India, the United States and the former USSR - disposing of an absolute majority."
The Penrose method takes the square root of the millions of inhabitants in each country.
Read more about this topic: United Nations Parliamentary Assembly
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