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The paper considers a general model of electoral systems combining district-based elections with a compensatory mechanism in order to create any outcome between strictly majoritarian and purely proportional seat allocation. It contains vote…

Public opinion polling is usually done by random sampling from the entire population, treating individual opinions as independent. In the real world, individuals' opinions are often correlated, e.g., among friends in a social network. In…

We study multiwinner elections with approval-based preferences. An instance of a multiwinner election consists of a set of alternatives, a population of voters---each voter approves a subset of alternatives, and the desired committee size…

Social choice theory is the study of preference aggregation across a population, used both in mechanism design for human agents and in the democratic alignment of language models. In this study, we propose the representative social choice…

Partisan gerrymandering, i.e., manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is one of the major challenges to election integrity in modern day democracies. Yet most of the existing methods for detecting partisan…

In societal-scale decision-making systems the collective is faced with the problem of ensuring that the derived group decision is in accord with the collective's intention. In modern systems, political institutions have instatiated…

Proportional apportionment is the problem of assigning seats to parties according to their relative share of votes. Divisor methods are the de-facto standard solution, used in many countries. In recent literature, there are two algorithms…

When confronted with a host of issues, groups often save time and energy by compiling many issues into a single bundle when making decisions. This reduces the time and cost of group decision-making, but it also leads to suboptimal outcomes…

To successfully navigate its environment, an agent must construct and maintain representations of the other agents that it encounters. Such representations are useful for many tasks, but they are not without cost. As a result, agents must…

In the apportionment problem, a fixed number of seats must be distributed among parties in proportion to the number of voters supporting each party. We study a generalization of this setting, in which voters can support multiple parties by…

A central feature of many deliberative processes, such as citizens' assemblies and deliberative polls, is the opportunity for participants to engage directly with experts. While participants are typically invited to propose questions for…

Strategic models of legislative bargaining predict that proposers can extract high shares of economic surplus by identifying and exploiting weak coalition partners. However, strength and weakness can be difficult to assess even with…

The major finding, of this article, is an ensemble method, but more exactly, a novel, better ranked voting system (and other variations of it), that aims to solve the problem of finding the best candidate to represent the voters. We have…

Some argue that political stability is best served through a two-party system. This study refutes this. The author mathematically defines the stability and rigidity of electoral systems comprised of any quantity of electors and parties. In…

Cooperation in the form of vote trading, also known as logrolling, is central for law-making processes, shaping the development of democratic societies. Empirical evidence of logrolling is scarce and limited to highly specific situations…

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…

The dynamics of random transitive delegations on a graph are of particular interest when viewed through the lens of an emerging voting paradigm, liquid democracy. This paradigm allows voters to choose between directly voting and…

The executive branch (the government) is usually not directly elected by the people, but is created by another elected body or person such as the parliament or the president. As a result, its members are not directly accountable to the…

Corruption is an endemic societal problem with profound implications in the development of nations. In combating this issue, cross-national evidence supporting the effectiveness of the rule of law seems at odds with poorly realized outcomes…

In decentralized systems, it is often necessary to select an 'active' subset of participants from the total participant pool, with the goal of satisfying computational limitations or optimizing resource efficiency. This selection can…