Related papers: Universality in voting behavior: an empirical anal…

Ethnic-based political inequality is widespread, yet its underlying drivers remain poorly understood. This paper shows that an ethnic group's relative size is a key correlate of its access to central executive power. Using data on 575…

In proportional elections with open lists the excess of preferences received by candidates with respect to the list average is known to follow a universal lognormal distribution. We show that lognormality is broken provided preferences are…

The Council of the European Union (EU) is one of the main decision-making bodies of the EU. A number of decisions require a qualified majority, the support of 55% of the member states (currently 15) that represent at least 65% of the total…

In real-world elections where voters cast preference ballots, voters often provide only a partial ranking of the candidates. Despite this empirical reality, prior social choice literature frequently analyzes fairness criteria under the…

How to elect the representatives in legislative bodies is a question that every modern democracy has to answer. This design task has to consider various elements so as to fulfill the citizens' expectations and contribute to the maintenance…

We introduce the model of line-up elections which captures parallel or sequential single-winner elections with a shared candidate pool. The goal of a line-up election is to find a high-quality assignment of a set of candidates to a set of…

We use causal inference to study how designing ballots with and without party designations impacts electoral outcomes when partisan voters rely on party-order cues to infer candidate affiliation in races without designations. If the party…

Politics around the world exhibits increasing polarization, demonstrated in part by rigid voting configurations in institutions like legislatures or courts. A crux of polarization is separation along a unidimensional ideological axis, but…

Systems of indirect voting based on the principle of qualified majority can be analysed using the methods of game theory. In particular, this applies to the voting system in the Council of the European Union, which was recently a subject of…

We study positional voting rules when candidates and voters are embedded in a common metric space, and cardinal preferences are naturally given by distances in the metric space. In a positional voting rule, each candidate receives a score…

Election rules are formal processes that aggregate voters preferences, typically to select a single candidate, called the winner. Most of the election rules studied in the literature require the voters to rank the candidates from the most…

A key promise of democratic voting is that, by accounting for all constituents' preferences, it produces decisions that benefit the constituency overall. It is alarming, then, that all deterministic voting rules have unbounded distortion:…

Comparing the ranking of candidates by different voters is an important topic in social and information science with a high relevance from the point of view of practical applications. In general, ties and pairs of incomparable candidates…

In light of the classic impossibility results of Arrow and Gibbard and Satterthwaite regarding voting with ordinal rules, there has been recent interest in characterizing how well common voting rules approximate the social optimum. In order…

The time evolution of the response of electors to political life is analyzed for the Italian Republic over a 70 years span in which 18 political elections have taken place. The basis for the performed analyses are the official data…

Economic competition between humans leads to income inequality, but, so far, there has been little understanding of underlying quantitative mechanisms governing such a collective behavior. We analyze datasets of household income from 67…

Like many other voting systems, Majority Judgement suffers from the weaknesses of the underlying mathematical model: Elections as problem of choice or ranking. We show how the model can be enhanced to take into account the complete process…

Winner selection by majority, in an election between two candidates, is the only rule compatible with democratic principles. Instead, when the candidates are three or more and the voters rank candidates in order of preference, there are no…

Elections play a fundamental role in democratic societies, however they are often characterized by unexpected results. Here we discuss an election campaign model inspired by the compartmental epidemiology, and we show that the model…

An election is a process through which citizens in liberal democracies select their governing bodies, usually through voting. For elections to be truly honest, people must be able to vote freely without being subject to coercion; that is…