Related papers: Electing the Executive Branch
The executive branch (the government) is usually not directly elected by the people, but is created by another elected body or person such as the parliament or the president. As a result, its members are not directly accountable to the…
Direct democracy is a special case of an ensemble of classifiers, where every person (classifier) votes on every issue. This fails when the average voter competence (classifier accuracy) falls below 50%, which can happen in noisy settings…
We consider a voting model, where a number of candidates need to be selected subject to certain feasibility constraints. The model generalises committee elections (where there is a single constraint on the number of candidates that need to…
We study multiwinner elections with approval-based preferences. An instance of a multiwinner election consists of a set of alternatives, a population of voters---each voter approves a subset of alternatives, and the desired committee size…
Election rules are formal processes that aggregate voters preferences, typically to select a single candidate, called the winner. Most of the election rules studied in the literature require the voters to rank the candidates from the most…
We present an alternative voting system that aims at bridging the gap between proportional representative systems and majoritarian, single winner election systems. The system lets people vote for multiple parties, but then assigns each…
We present a new model that describes the process of electing a group of representatives (e.g., a parliament) for a group of voters. In this model, called the voting committee model, the elected group of representatives runs a number of…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic paradigm whereby voters decide on a set of projects to fund with a limited budget. We consider PB in a setting where voters report ordinal preferences over projects and have (possibly) asymmetric…
What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good,…
The major finding, of this article, is an ensemble method, but more exactly, a novel, better ranked voting system (and other variations of it), that aims to solve the problem of finding the best candidate to represent the voters. We have…
We study how office-seeking parties use direct democracy to shape elections. A party with a strong electoral base can benefit from using a binding referendum to resolve issues that divide its core supporters. When referendums do not bind,…
Elections are the central institution of democratic processes, and often the elected body -- in either public or private governance -- is a committee of individuals. To ensure the legitimacy of elected bodies, the electoral processes should…
Given a set of agents with approval preferences over each other, we study the task of finding $k$ matchings fairly representing everyone's preferences. We model the problem as an approval-based multiwinner election where the set of…
In liquid democracy, agents can either vote directly or delegate their vote to a different agent of their choice. This results in a power structure in which certain agents possess more voting weight than others. As a result, it opens up…
Democratic governments comprise a subset of a population whose goal is to produce coherent decisions, solving societal challenges while respecting the will of the people. New governance frameworks represent this as a social network rather…
Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a process in which voters decide how to allocate a common budget; most commonly it is done by ordinary people -- in particular, residents of some municipality -- to decide on a fraction of the municipal…
We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…
Voting power determines the "power" of individuals who cast votes; their power is based on their ability to influence the winning-ness of a coalition. Usually each individual acts alone, casting either all or none of their votes and is…
Every representative democracy must specify a mechanism under which voters choose their representatives. The most common mechanism in the United States -- Winner takes all single-member districts -- both enables substantial partisan…
Assume $k$ candidates need to be selected. The candidates appear over time. Each time one appears, it must be immediately selected or rejected -- a decision that is made by a group of individuals through voting. Assume the voters use…