Related papers: Evaluating Partisan Gerrymandering in Wisconsin
Generalized planning is concerned with the characterization and computation of plans that solve many instances at once. In the standard formulation, a generalized plan is a mapping from feature or observation histories into actions,…
Apportionment is the act of distributing the seats of a legislature among political parties (or states) in proportion to their vote shares (or populations). A famous impossibility by Balinski and Young (2001) shows that no apportionment…
The Political Districting Problem is mapped to a $q$-state Potts model in which the constraints can be written as interactions between sites or external fields acting on the system. Districting into $q$ voter districts is equivalent to…
Apportionment is the problem of distributing $h$ indivisible seats across states in proportion to the states' populations. In the context of the US House of Representatives, this problem has a rich history and is a prime example of…
Adaptive behavior emerges through a dynamic interaction between cognitive agents and changing environmental demands. The investigation of information processing underlying adaptive behavior relies on controlled experimental settings in…
In the months leading up to political elections in the United States, forecasts are widespread and take on multiple forms, including projections of what party will win the popular vote, state ratings, and predictions of vote margins at the…
We propose a structural approach to extrapolate average partial effects away from the cutoff in regression discontinuity designs (RDDs). Our focus is on applications that exploit closely contested school district referenda to estimate the…
Elections for public offices in democratic nations are large-scale examples of collective decision-making. As a complex system with a multitude of interactions among agents, we can anticipate that universal macroscopic patterns could emerge…
The boundaries of electoral constituencies for assembly and parliamentary seats are drafted using a process referred to as delimitation, which ensures fair and equal representation of all citizens. The current delimitation exercise suffers…
In district-based elections, electors cast votes in their respective districts. In each district, the party with maximum votes wins the corresponding seat in the governing body. The election result is based on the number of seats won by…
Predicting the winner of an election is of importance to multiple stakeholders. To formulate the problem, we consider an independent sequence of categorical data with a finite number of possible outcomes in each. The data is assumed to be…
To keep card sorting with a lot of cards concise, a common strategy for gauging mental models involves presenting participants with fewer randomly selected cards instead of the full set. This is a decades-old practice, but its effects…
We first establish new local limit estimates for the probability that a nondecreasing integer-valued random walk lies at time $n$ at an arbitrary value, encompassing in particular large deviation regimes. This enables us to derive scaling…
We explore the fairness of a redistricting game introduced by Mixon and Villar, which provides a two-party protocol for dividing a state into electoral districts, without the participation of an independent authority. We analyze the game in…
Crowdsourcing has become an effective and popular tool for human-powered computation to label large datasets. Since the workers can be unreliable, it is common in crowdsourcing to assign multiple workers to one task, and to aggregate the…
When a beneficial mutation occurs in a population, the new, favored allele may spread to the entire population. This process is known as a selective sweep. Suppose we sample $n$ individuals at the end of a selective sweep. If we focus on a…
Elections employ various voting systems to determine winners based on voters' preferences. However, many recent ranked-choice elections have forced voters to truncate their ballots by only ranking a subset of the candidates. This study…
Strategic manipulation of elections is typically studied in the context of promoting individual candidates. In parliamentary elections, however, the focus shifts: voters may care more about the overall governing coalition than the…
Many democratic societies have become more politically polarized, with the U.S. as the main example. The origins of this phenomenon are still not well-understood and subject to debate. To better understand the mechanisms underlying…
We investigate the set a) of positive, trace preserving maps acting on density matrices of size N, and a sequence of its nested subsets: the sets of maps which are b) decomposable, c) completely positive, d) extended by identity impose…