Related papers: A discrete districting plan
Street-level bureaucrats, such as caseworkers and border guards routinely face the dilemma of whether to follow rigid policy or exercise discretion based on professional judgement. However, frequent overrides threaten consistency and…
We study a random game in which two players in turn play a fixed number of moves. For each move, there are two possible choices. To each possible outcome of the game we assign a winner in an i.i.d. fashion with a fixed parameter p. In the…
Standard regression approaches assume that some finite number of the response distribution characteristics, such as location and scale, change as a (parametric or nonparametric) function of predictors. However, it is not always appropriate…
Using an ensemble of redistricting plans, we evaluate whether a given political districting faithfully represents the geo-political landscape. Redistricting plans are sampled by a Monte Carlo algorithm from a probability distribution that…
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…
In this work, we propose a global model selection criterion to estimate the graph of conditional dependencies of a random vector based on a finite sample. By global criterion, we mean optimizing a function over the entire set of possible…
We examine the extent of gerrymandering for the 2010 General Assembly district map of Wisconsin. We find that there is substantial variability in the election outcome depending on what maps are used. We also found robust evidence that the…
We describe a simple and yet surprisingly powerful probabilistic technique which shows how to find in a dense graph a large subset of vertices in which all (or almost all) small subsets have many common neighbors. Recently this technique…
In an election in which each voter ranks all of the candidates, we consider the head-to-head results between each pair of candidates and form a labeled directed graph, called the margin graph, which contains the margin of victory of each…
The large majority of inferences drawn in empirical political research follow from model-based associations (e.g. regression). Here, we articulate the benefits of predictive modeling as a complement to this approach. Predictive models aim…
The way that people make choices or exhibit preferences can be strongly affected by the set of available alternatives, often called the choice set. Furthermore, there are usually heterogeneous preferences, either at an individual level…
In many practical scenarios, a population is divided into disjoint groups for better administration, e.g., electorates into political districts, employees into departments, students into school districts, and so on. However, grouping people…
Motivated by the problem of partisan gerrymandering, we introduce an electoral system for a representative democracy called democratic cellular voting, designed to make modern packing and cracking strategies irrelevant by allowing districts…
Granular geographic data present new opportunities to understand how neighborhoods are formed, and how they influence politics. At the same time, the inherent subjectivity of neighborhoods creates methodological challenges in measuring and…
Graphs are widely used for describing systems made up of many interacting components and for understanding the structure of their interactions. Various statistical models exist, which describe this structure as the result of a combination…
Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…
Predicting the winner of an election is of importance to multiple stakeholders. To formulate the problem, we consider an independent sequence of categorical data with a finite number of possible outcomes in each. The data is assumed to be…
Forecasting elections -- a challenging, high-stakes problem -- is the subject of much uncertainty, subjectivity, and media scrutiny. To shed light on this process, we develop a method for forecasting elections from the perspective of…
Researchers and legislators alike continue the search for methods of drawing fair districting plans. A districting plan is a partition of a state's subdivisions (e.g. counties, voting precincts, etc.). By modeling these districting plans as…
We use a decision-theoretic framework to study the problem of forecasting discrete outcomes when the forecaster is unable to discriminate among a set of plausible forecast distributions because of partial identification or concerns about…