Related papers: Measuring Political Gerrymandering
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…
Many people believe that it is disadvantageous for members aligning with a minority party to cluster in cities, as this makes it easier for the majority party to gerrymander district boundaries to diminish the representation of the…
This survey study focuses on public opinion regarding the use of algorithmic decision-making in government sectors, specifically in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Algorithms are becoming increasingly prevalent in various public domains,…
One of the most widely known and important applications of probability and statistics is scientific polling to forecast election results. In 1936, Gallup predicted correctly the victory of Roosevelt over Landon in the US presidential…
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.…
In this paper, we apply techniques of ensemble analysis to understand the political baseline for Congressional representation in Colorado. We generate a large random sample of reasonable redistricting plans and determine the partisan…
Bibliometric indexes are customary used in evaluating the impact of scientific research, even though it is very well known that in different research areas they may range in very different intervals. Sometimes, this is evident even within a…
The notion of distortion in social choice problems has been defined to measure the loss in efficiency -- typically measured by the utilitarian social welfare, the sum of utilities of the participating agents -- due to having access only to…
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…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
In an election where $n$ voters rank $m$ candidates, a Condorcet winning set is a committee of $k$ candidates such that for any outside candidate, a majority of voters prefer some committee member. Condorcet's paradox shows that some…
We study the properties of elections that have a given position matrix (in such elections each candidate is ranked on each position by a number of voters specified in the matrix). We show that counting elections that generate a given…
Recursive reasoning systems alternate between acquiring new evidence and refining an accumulated understanding. Two design choices are typically left implicit: how to represent the evolving reasoning state, and when to stop iterating. This…
In recent decades, state legislatures have often drawn U.S. Congressional voting districts that look---to the human eye---to be rather twisted. In this paper, we propose a method to measure how much districts "meander" via a computation of…
An election over a finite set of candidates is called single-crossing if, as we sweep through the list of voters from left to right, the relative order of every pair of candidates changes at most once. Such elections have many attractive…
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…
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…
Encouraged by decision makers' appetite for future information on topics ranging from elections to pandemics, and enabled by the explosion of data and computational methods, model based forecasts have garnered increasing influence on a…
Manipulation, bribery, and control are well-studied ways of changing the outcome of an election. Many voting rules are, in the general case, computationally resistant to some of these manipulative actions. However when restricted to…
The related concepts of partisan belief systems, issue alignment, and partisan sorting are central to our understanding of politics. These phenomena have been studied using measures of alignment between pairs of topics, or how much…