Related papers: Quantifying gerrymandering using the vote distribu…

In many practical scenarios, a population is divided into disjoint groups for better administration, e.g., electorates into political districts, employees into departments, students into school districts, and so on. However, grouping people…

We consider three algorithms for allocating parliamentary seats by proportional representation. The usual approach to describing such algorithms is to compute a quota of votes that each party uses to "acquire'' representatives. This kind of…

This paper studies algorithmic fairness when the protected attribute is location. To handle protected attributes that are continuous, such as age or income, the standard approach is to discretize the domain into predefined groups, and…

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…

Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…

We study a model of a population making a binary decision based on information spreading within the population, which is fully connected or covering a square grid. We assume that a fraction of the population wants to make the choice of the…

The paper considers the problem of finding the number of dominant voters in two-level voting procedures. At the first stage, voting is conducted among local groups of voters, and at the second stage, the results are aggregated to form a…

A most debated topic of the last years is whether simple statistical physics models can explain collective features of social dynamics. A necessary step in this line of endeavour is to find regularities in data referring to large scale…

Parliaments dominated by two political blocs often face legislative inefficiencies as polarization increases. A central institutional question concerns how majority and supermajority rules interact with parliamentary composition to balance…

We performed extensive simulations accompanied by a detailed study of a two-segment size random sequential model on the line. We followed the kinetics towards the jamming state, but we paid particular attention to the characterization of…

Clustering is an unsupervised learning task that aims to partition data into a set of clusters. In many applications, these clusters correspond to real-world constructs (e.g. electoral districts) whose benefit can only be attained by groups…

Referring to a standard context of voting theory, and to the classic notion of voting situation, here we show that it is possible to observe any arbitrary set of elections' outcomes, no matter how paradoxical it may appear. On this purpose…

We design and analyze a protocol for dividing a state into districts, where parties take turns proposing a division, and freezing a district from the other party's proposed division. We show that our protocol has predictable and provable…

How to fairly apportion congressional seats to states has been debated for centuries. We present an alternative perspective on apportionment, centered not on states but "families" of state, sets of states with "divisor-method" quotas with…

In an election in which each voter ranks all of the candidates, we consider the head-to-head results between each pair of candidates and form a labeled directed graph, called the margin graph, which contains the margin of victory of each…

Individual fairness, proposed by Dwork et al., is a fairness measure that is supposed to prevent the unfair treatment of individuals on the subgroup level, and to overcome the problem that group fairness measures are susceptible to…

Voting power determines the "power" of individuals who cast votes; their power is based on their ability to influence the winning-ness of a coalition. Usually each individual acts alone, casting either all or none of their votes and is…

Given a set of agents with approval preferences over each other, we study the task of finding $k$ matchings fairly representing everyone's preferences. We model the problem as an approval-based multiwinner election where the set of…

In this paper we discuss the problems of modern representative democracy and we look at the selection of legislators by lot as a way to tame some of the drawbacks of that system. It is recalled at the beginning that resorting to sortition…

The statistics of gap ratios between consecutive energy levels is a widely used tool, in particular in the context of many-body physics, to distinguish between chaotic and integrable systems, described respectively by Gaussian ensembles of…