Related papers: Computational geometry and the U.S. Supreme Court
In most contemporary approaches to decision making, a decision problem is described by a sets of states and set of outcomes, and a rich set of acts, which are functions from states to outcomes over which the decision maker (DM) has…
Successful attempts to predict judges' votes shed light into how legal decisions are made and, ultimately, into the behavior and evolution of the judiciary. Here, we investigate to what extent it is possible to make predictions of a…
Computational Politics is the study of computational methods to analyze and moderate users' behaviors related to political activities such as election campaign persuasion, political affiliation, and opinion mining. With the rapid…
There has been a recent media blitz on a cohort of mathematicians valiantly working to fix America's democratic system by combatting gerrymandering with geometry. While statistics commonly features in the courtroom (forensics, DNA analysis,…
We develop a model of issue-specific voting behavior. This model can be used to explore lawmakers' personal voting patterns of voting by issue area, providing an exploratory window into how the language of the law is correlated with…
As the most public component of the Supreme Court's decision-making process, oral argument receives an out-sized share of attention in the popular media. Despite its prominence, however, the basic function and operation of oral argument as…
Topological aspects of interfaces are studied by comparing quantitatively the evolving three-color patterns in three different models, such as the three-state voter, Potts and extended voter models. The statistical analysis of some…
There is a class of models for pol/mil/econ bargaining and conflict that is loosely based on the Median Voter Theorem which has been used with great success for about 30 years. However, there are fundamental mathematical limitations to…
We consider the possibility of designing an election method that eliminates the incentives for a voter to rank any other candidate equal to or ahead of his or her sincere favorite. We refer to these methods as satisfying the ``Strong…
Social choice is replete with various settings including single-winner voting, multi-winner voting, probabilistic voting, multiple referenda, and public decision making. We study a general model of social choice called Sub-Committee Voting…
This article starts by introducing a new theoretical framework to model spatial systems which is obtained from the framework of interacting particle systems by replacing the traditional graphical structure that defines the network of…
Cumulative and quadratic voting are two distributional voting methods that are expressive, promoting fairness and inclusion, particularly in the realm of participatory budgeting. Despite these benefits, graphical voter interfaces for…
It is important to study how strategic agents can affect the outcome of an election. There has been a long line of research in the computational study of elections on the complexity of manipulative actions such as manipulation and bribery.…
Although neural models have performed impressively well on various tasks such as image recognition and question answering, their reasoning ability has been measured in only few studies. In this work, we focus on spatial reasoning and…
The mathematical study of voting, social choice theory, has traditionally only been applicable to choices among a few predetermined alternatives, but not to open-ended decisions such as collectively selecting a textual statement. We…
We study strategic candidate positioning in multidimensional spatial-voting elections. Voters and candidates are represented as points in $\mathbb{R}^d$, and each voter supports the candidate that is closest under a distance induced by an…
Computational models are quantitative representations of systems. By analyzing and comparing the outputs of such models, it is possible to gain a better understanding of the system itself. Though as the complexity of model outputs…
Decisions about how the population of the United States should be divided into legislative districts have powerful and not fully understood effects on the outcomes of elections. The problem of understanding what we might mean by "fair…
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 use the ``map of elections'' approach of Szufa et al. (AAMAS-2020) to analyze several well-known vote distributions. For each of them, we give an explicit formula or an efficient algorithm for computing its frequency matrix, which…