Related papers: The Efficiency Gap, Voter Turnout, and the Efficie…
"Compactness," or the use of shape as a proxy for fairness, has been a long-running theme in the scrutiny of electoral districts; badly-shaped districts are often flagged as examples of the abuse of power known as gerrymandering. The most…
Political fragmentation in Africa poses to a significant challenge to effective governance and stability. Traditional measures of party system fragmentation, such as the Effective Number of Parties (ENP) index, often fail to capture the…
Recent political campaigns have demonstrated how technologies are used to boost election outcomes by microtargeting voters. We propose and analyze a framework which analyzes how political activists use technologies to target voters. Voters…
The challenge of understanding the collective behaviors of social systems can benefit from methods and concepts from physics [1-6], not because humans are similar to electrons, but because certain large-scale behaviors can be understood…
How does one allocate a collection of resources to a set of strategic agents in a fair and efficient manner without using money? For in many scenarios it is not feasible to use money to compensate agents for otherwise unsatisfactory…
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…
The Bradley effect concerns the discrepancy between opinion polls and actual election outcomes that emerges when candidates do not exhibit ideological, sexual or racial mainstream features. This effect was first observed during the 1982…
Political actors often manipulate redistricting plans to gain electoral advantages, a process known as gerrymandering. Several states have implemented institutional reforms to address this problem, such as establishing map-drawing…
We study in details the turnout rate statistics for 77 elections in 11 different countries. We show that the empirical results established in a previous paper for French elections appear to hold much more generally. We find in particular…
When the performance of a team of agents exceeds our expectations or fall short of them, we often explain this by saying that there was some synergy in the team---either positive (the team exceeded our expectations) or negative (they fell…
Quota-based fairness mechanisms like the so-called Rooney rule or four-fifths rule are used in selection problems such as hiring or college admission to reduce inequalities based on sensitive demographic attributes. These mechanisms are…
In social choice there often arises a conflict between the majority principle (the search for a candidate that is as good as possible for as many voters as possible), and the protection of minority rights (choosing a candidate that is not…
Many democratic countries use district-based elections where there is a "seat" for each district in the governing body. In each district, the party whose candidate gets the maximum number of votes wins the corresponding seat. The result of…
The Current Population Survey is the gold-standard data source for studying who turns out to vote in elections. However, it suffers from potentially nonignorable unit and item nonresponse. Fortunately, after elections, the total number of…
Most social choice rules assume access to full rankings, while current alignment practice -- despite aiming for diversity -- typically treats voters as anonymous and comparisons as independent, effectively extracting only about one bit per…
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…
Participatory budgeting is one of the exciting developments in deliberative grassroots democracy. We concentrate on approval elections and propose proportional representation axioms in participatory budgeting, by generalizing relevant…
Most democratic countries use election methods to transform election results into whole numbers which usually give the number of seats in a legislative body the parties obtained. Which election method does this best can be specified by…
We study mechanisms for candidate selection that seek to minimize the social cost, where voters and candidates are associated with points in some underlying metric space. The social cost of a candidate is the sum of its distances to each…
The outcome of elections is strongly dependent on the districting choices, making thus possible (and frequent) the gerrymandering phenomenon, i.e.\ politicians suitably changing the shape of electoral districts in order to win the…