The Geometry of Coalition Power: Majorization, Lattices, and Displacement in Multiwinner Elections
Abstract
How much influence can a coordinated coalition exert in a multiwinner Top- election under a positional scoring rule? We study the maximum displacement problem: with coalition size , how many of the current top- winners can be forced out? We show coalition power decomposes into two independent prefix-majorization constraints, capturing how much the coalition can (i) boost outsiders and (ii) suppress weak winners. For arbitrary scoring rules these prefix inequalities are tight, efficiently checkable necessary conditions (exact in the continuous relaxation). For common-step arithmetic-progression (AP) score ladders, including Borda, truncated Borda, -approval/-veto, plurality, and multi-level rules such as ----, we prove a Majorization--Lattice Theorem: feasible aggregate score vectors are exactly the integer points satisfying the Block--HLP prefix-sum capacity constraints plus a single global congruence condition modulo the step size . For Borda () the congruence vanishes, yielding a pure prefix-majorization test. This characterization yields an exact feasibility oracle for displacing winners, and an algorithm (via dual-envelope binary search) for computing the maximum achievable displacement . Experiments on Mallows profiles and PrefLib elections confirm exact cutoffs, diminishing returns, and substantial gains over baseline heuristics; for they also demonstrate the predicted congruence effect, where prefix-only tests produce false positives. The oracle scales to extreme instances, processing candidates in under 28 seconds (memory permitting).
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.16723,
title = {The Geometry of Coalition Power: Majorization, Lattices, and Displacement in Multiwinner Elections},
author = {Qian Guo and Yidan Hu and Rui Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.16723},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
63 pages, 5 figures