Related papers: Locating the representational baseline: Republican…

A national voting population, when segmented into groups like, for example, different states, can yield a counter-intuitive scenario where the winner may not necessarily get the most number of total votes. A recent example is the 2016…

In representative democracies, the election of new representatives in regular election cycles is meant to prevent corruption and other misbehavior by elected officials and to keep them accountable in service of the ``will of the people."…

The outcome of the British General Election to be held in just over one week's time is widely regarded as the most difficult in living memory to predict. Current polls suggest that the two main parties are neck and neck but that there will…

Since Downs proposed that the act of voting is irrational in 1957, myriad models have been proposed to explain voting and account for observed turnout patterns. We propose a model in which partisans consider both the instrumental and…

We investigate the problem of computing the probability of winning in an election where voter attendance is uncertain. More precisely, we study the setting where, in addition to a total ordering of the candidates, each voter is associated…

The apportionment problem constitutes a fundamental problem in democratic societies: How to distribute a fixed number of seats among a set of states in proportion to the states' populations? This--seemingly simple--task has led to a rich…

There has been much recent work on multiwinner voting systems. However, sometimes a committee is highly structured, and if we want to vote for such a committee, our voting method should be more structured as well. We consider committees…

Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…

In this paper we study rankings induced by power indices of players in simple game models of bicameral legislatures. For a bicameral legislature where bills are passed with a simple majority vote in each house we give a condition involving…

Social media is often blamed for the creation of echo chambers. However, these claims fail to consider the prevalence of offline echo chambers resulting from high levels of partisan segregation in the United States. Our article empirically…

Private donors contributed more than $350 million to local election officials to support the administration of the 2020 election. Supporters argue these grants were neutral and necessary to maintain normal election operations during the…

We provide mechanisms and new metric distortion bounds for line-up elections. In such elections, a set of $n$ voters, $m$ candidates, and $\ell$ positions are all located in a metric space. The goal is to choose a set of candidates and…

Complexity of voting manipulation is a prominent topic in computational social choice. In this work, we consider a two-stage voting manipulation scenario. First, a malicious party (an attacker) attempts to manipulate the election outcome in…

This paper is devoted to the application of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics to social (political) science. By using the quantum dynamical equations we model the process of decision making in US elections. The crucial point…

Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…

Gerrymandering voting districts is one of the most salient concerns of contemporary American society, and the creation of new voting maps, along with their subsequent legal challenges, speaks for much of our modern political discourse. The…

Fairness in multiwinner elections, a growing line of research in computational social choice, primarily concerns the use of constraints to ensure fairness. Recent work proposed a model to find a diverse \emph{and} representative committee…

We measure polarization in the United States Congress using the network science concept of modularity. Modularity provides a conceptually-clear measure of polarization that reveals both the number of relevant groups and the strength of…

Political candidates often shift their positions opportunistically in hopes of capturing more votes. When there are only two candidates, the best strategy for each of them is often to move towards the other. This eventually results in two…

Evolutionary societal changes often prompt a debate. The positions of the two major political parties in the United States on civil rights issues underwent a reversal in the 20th century. The conventional view holds that this shift was a…