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Permanent citizens' assemblies are ongoing deliberative bodies composed of randomly selected citizens, organized into panels that rotate over time. Unlike one-off panels, which represent the population in a single snapshot, permanent…
Democracy in a state is possibly a gain to have the government that represents the whole citizens. But the main element of the democratic system is the ability of the governmental functions in the state to act properly in order to gain the…
We introduce Flexible Representative Democracy (FRD), a novel hybrid of Representative Democracy (RD) and Direct Democracy (DD) in which voters can alter the issue-dependent weights of a set of elected representatives. In line with the…
The public goods game is a famous example illustrating the tragedy of the commons. In this game cooperating individuals contribute to a pool, which in turn is distributed to all members of the group, including defectors who reap the same…
An important problem in computational social choice theory is the complexity of undesirable behavior among agents, such as control, manipulation, and bribery in election systems. These kinds of voting strategies are often tempting at the…
Liquid democracy with ranked delegations is a novel voting scheme that unites the practicability of representative democracy with the idealistic appeal of direct democracy: Every voter decides between casting their vote on a question at…
We design two mechanisms that ensure that the majority preferred option wins in all equilibria. The first one is a simultaneous game where agents choose other agents to cooperate with on top of the vote for an alternative, thus overcoming…
The computational study of elections generally assumes that the preferences of the electorate come in as a list of votes. Depending on the context, it may be much more natural to represent the list succinctly, as the distinct votes of the…
Using the recently introduced declination function, we estimate the net number of seats won in the US House of Representatives due to asymmetries in vote distributions. Such asymmetries can arise from combinations of partisan gerrymandering…
The apportionment problem deals with the fair distribution of a discrete set of $k$ indivisible resources (such as legislative seats) to $n$ entities (such as parties or geographic subdivisions). Highest averages methods are a frequently…
To assess the presence of gerrymandering, one can consider the shapes of districts or the distribution of votes. The "efficiency gap," which does the latter, plays a central role in a 2016 federal court case on the constitutionality of…
Voting methods are instrumental design elements of democracies. Citizens use them to express and aggregate their preferences to reach a collective decision. However, voting outcomes can be as sensitive to voting rules as they are to…
In certain parliamentary democracies, there are two major parties that move in and out of power every few elections, and a third minority party that essentially never governs. We present a simple model to account for this phenomenon, in…
Peer punishment of free-riders (defectors) is a key mechanism for promoting cooperation in society. However, it is highly unstable since some cooperators may contribute to a common project but refuse to punish defectors. Centralized…
Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…
We study how office-seeking parties use direct democracy to shape elections. A party with a strong electoral base can benefit from using a binding referendum to resolve issues that divide its core supporters. When referendums do not bind,…
In many proportional parliamentary elections, electoral thresholds (typically 3-5%) are used to promote stability and governability by preventing the election of parties with very small representation. However, these thresholds often result…
The paper provides an analysis of the voting method known as delegable proxy voting, or liquid democracy. The analysis first positions liquid democracy within the theory of binary aggregation. It then focuses on two issues of the system:…
In this article, we study connections between representation theory and efficient solutions to the conjugacy problem on finitely generated groups. The main focus is on the conjugacy problem in conjugacy separable groups, where we measure…
Most of the computational study of election problems has assumed that each voter's preferences are, or should be extended to, a total order. However in practice voters may have preferences with ties. We study the complexity of manipulative…