Related papers: Apportionment methods
We develop new voting mechanisms for the case when voters and candidates are located in an arbitrary unknown metric space, and the goal is to choose a candidate minimizing social cost: the total distance from the voters to this candidate.…
We consider the notions of agreement, diversity, and polarization in ordinal elections (that is, in elections where voters rank the candidates). While (computational) social choice offers good measures of agreement between the voters, such…
Recent works have studied the design of algorithms for selecting representative sortition panels. However, the most central question remains unaddressed: Do these panels reflect the entire population's opinion? We present a positive answer…
Randomisation and time-sharing are some of the oldest methods to achieve fairness. I make a case that applying these approaches to social choice settings constitutes a powerful paradigm that deserves an extensive and thorough examination. I…
Platforms for online civic participation rely heavily on methods for condensing thousands of comments into a relevant handful, based on whether participants agree or disagree with them. These methods should guarantee fair representation of…
Coalitional manipulation in voting is considered to be any scenario in which a group of voters decide to misrepresent their vote in order to secure an outcome they all prefer to the first outcome of the election when they vote honestly. The…
The traditional axiomatic approach to voting is motivated by the problem of reconciling differences in subjective preferences. In contrast, a dominant line of work in the theory of voting over the past 15 years has considered a different…
We design two mechanisms that ensure that the majority preferred option wins in all equilibria. The first one is a simultaneous game where agents choose other agents to cooperate with on top of the vote for an alternative, thus overcoming…
We compare and contrast fourteen measures that have been proposed for the purpose of quantifying partisan gerrymandering. We consider measures that, rather than examining the shapes of districts, utilize only the partisan vote distribution…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
Online data has the potential to transform how researchers and companies produce election forecasts. Social media surveys, online panels and even comments scraped from the internet can offer valuable insights into political preferences.…
We study how office-seeking parties use direct democracy to shape elections. A party with a strong electoral base can benefit from using a binding referendum to resolve issues that divide its core supporters. When referendums do not bind,…
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…
Fairness in multiwinner elections is studied in varying contexts. For instance, diversity of candidates and representation of voters are both separately termed as being fair. A common denominator to ensure fairness across all such contexts…
A Ranked candidate voting method based on Phragmen's procedure is described that can be used to produce a top-down proportional candidate list. The method complies with the Droop proportionality criterion satisfied by Single Transferable…
We view voting rules as classifiers that assign a winner (a class) to a profile of voters' preferences (an instance). We propose to apply techniques from formal explainability, most notably abductive and contrastive explanations, to…
Metric distortion in social choice is a framework for evaluating how well voting rules minimize social cost when both voters and candidates exist in a shared metric space, with a voter's cost defined by their distance to a candidate. Voters…
In accordance with "Democracy's Effect on Development: More Questions than Answers", we seek to carry out a study in following the description in the 'Questions for Further Study.' To that end, we studied 33 countries in the Sub-Saharan…
We introduce several electoral systems for multi-winner elections with approval ballots, generalizing the classical methods of Sainte-Lagu\"e and D'Hondt. Our approach is based on the works of Phragm\'en and Thiele. In the last section we…
We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a…