Related papers: Quantifying gerrymandering using the vote distribu…
Ranking, and inferences based on ranking of a set of entities, are important problems in numerous contexts. This is especially true in small area statistics where there may be only a limited amount of directly observed data from each entity…
Selecting representatives based on voters' preferences is a fundamental problem in social choice theory. While cardinal utility functions offer a detailed representation of preferences, ordinal rankings are often the only available…
We study mechanisms for candidate selection that seek to minimize the social cost, where voters and candidates are associated with points in some underlying metric space. The social cost of a candidate is the sum of its distances to each…
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…
While proportionality is frequently named as a desirable property of voting rules, its interpretation in multiwinner voting differs significantly from that in apportionment. We aim to bridge these two distinct notions of proportionality by…
The increasing cost of electoral campaigns raises the need for effective campaign planning and a precise understanding of the return of such investment. Interestingly, despite the strong impact of elections on our daily lives, how this…
Item nonresponse is frequently encountered in practice. Ignoring missing data can lose efficiency and lead to misleading inference. Fractional imputation is a frequentist approach of imputation for handling missing data. However, the…
Resource allocations in an election system, often with hundreds of polling locations over a territory such as a county, with the aim that voters receive fair and efficient services, is a challenging problem, as election resources are…
The Gap statistic is a standard method for determining the number of clusters in a set of data. The Gap statistic standardizes the graph of $\log(W_{k})$, where $W_{k}$ is the within-cluster dispersion, by comparing it to its expectation…
Here we present \texttt{electoral\_sim}, an open-source Python framework for simulating and comparing electoral systems across diverse voter preference distributions. The framework represents voters and candidates as points in a…
We discuss difficulties of evaluating partisan gerrymandering in the congressional districts in Utah and the failure of many common metrics in Utah. We explain why the Republican vote share in the least-Republican district (LRVS) is a good…
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…
Citizens' assemblies are an increasingly influential form of deliberative democracy, where randomly selected people discuss policy questions. The legitimacy of these assemblies hinges on their representation of the broader population, but…
Political fragmentation in Africa poses to a significant challenge to effective governance and stability. Traditional measures of party system fragmentation, such as the Effective Number of Parties (ENP) index, often fail to capture the…
Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so (Galileo Galilei). According to the above sentence we do not ask why we need to measure democracy but if it is possible to measure something which is not unequivocally defined.…
Community detection, as well as the identification of other structures like core periphery and disassortative patterns, is an important topic in network analysis. While most methods seek to find the best partition of the network according…
The recently proposed fractional scoring scheme is used to attribute publications to percentile rank classes. It is shown that in this way uncertainties and ambiguities in the evaluation of percentile ranks do not occur. Using the…
Apportionment is the task of assigning resources to entities with different entitlements in a fair manner, and specifically a manner that is as proportional as possible. The best-known application is the assignment of parliamentary seats to…
In this paper, we consider nonparametric multidimensional finite mixture models and we are interested in the semiparametric estimation of the population weights. Here, the i.i.d. observations are assumed to have at least three components…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic paradigm whereby voters decide on a set of projects to fund with a limited budget. We consider PB in a setting where voters report ordinal preferences over projects and have (possibly) asymmetric…