Related papers: Redistricting: Drawing the Line
Elections are the central institution of democratic processes, and often the elected body -- in either public or private governance -- is a committee of individuals. To ensure the legitimacy of elected bodies, the electoral processes should…
We explain the anomaly of election results between large cities and rural areas in terms of urban scaling in the 1948-2016 US elections and in the 2016 EU referendum of the UK. The scaling curves are all universal and depend on a single…
In a district-based election, we apply a voting rule $r$ to decide the winners in each district, and a candidate who wins in a maximum number of districts is the winner of the election. We present efficient sampling-based algorithms to…
Citizens' assemblies are a form of democratic innovation in which a randomly selected panel of constituents deliberates on questions of public interest. We study a novel goal for the selection of panel members: maximizing the entropy of the…
Landau, Reid, and Yershov [A Fair Division Solution to the Problem of Redistricting, \textit{Social Choice and Welfare}, 2008] propose a protocol for drawing legislative districts based on a two player fair division process, where each…
Committee-selection problems arise in many contexts and applications, and there has been increasing interest within the social choice research community on identifying which properties are satisfied by different multi-winner voting rules.…
We develop a theory of distributive competition under redistricting that explains both electoral outcomes and the equilibrium allocation of policy benefits by endogenizing voter pivotality. In a multi-district model with primaries, general…
Dynamic discrete choice models are widely employed to answer substantive and policy questions in settings where individuals' current choices have future implications. However, estimation of these models is often computationally intensive…
There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…
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…
Respondent-driven sampling is a widely-used network sampling technique, designed to sample from hard-to-reach populations. Estimation from the resulting samples is an area of active research, with software available to compute at least four…
We investigate two systems of fully proportional representation suggested by Chamberlin Courant and Monroe. Both systems assign a representative to each voter so that the "sum of misrepresentations" is minimized. The winner determination…
We present an alternative voting system that aims at bridging the gap between proportional representative systems and majoritarian, single winner election systems. The system lets people vote for multiple parties, but then assigns each…
Sortition is a political system in which decisions are made by panels of randomly selected citizens. The process for selecting a sortition panel is traditionally thought of as uniform sampling without replacement, which has strong fairness…
Non-linear voter models assume that the opinion of an agent depends on the opinions of its neighbors in a non-linear manner. This allows for voting rules different from majority voting. While the linear voter model is known to reach…
Evolutionary societal changes often prompt a debate. The positions of the two major political parties in the United States on civil rights issues underwent a reversal in the 20th century. The conventional view holds that this shift was a…
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…
Recent surveys have shown that an increasing portion of the US public believes the two major US parties adequately represent the US public opinion and think additional parties are needed. However, there are high barriers for third parties…
Traditionally, the problem of apportioning the seats of a legislative body has been viewed as a one-shot process with no dynamic considerations. While this approach is reasonable for some settings, dynamic aspects play an important role in…
U.S. presidential elections are decided by the Electoral College, established in 1789, and designed to mitigate potential risks arising from the collusion of large groups of citizens. A statewide winner-take-all popular voting system for…