Related papers: Electing the Executive Branch
In the United States electoral system, a candidate is elected indirectly by winning a majority of electoral votes cast by individual states, the election usually being decided by the votes cast by a small number of "swing states" where the…
In parliamentary elections, parties compete for a limited, typically fixed number of seats. Most parliaments are assembled using apportionment methods that distribute the seats based on the parties' vote counts. Common apportionment methods…
Liquid democracy is a mechanism for the division of labor in decision-making through the transitive delegation of influence. In essence, all individuals possess the autonomy to determine the issues with which they will engage directly,…
Many democratic societies use district-based elections, where the region under consideration is geographically divided into districts and a representative is chosen for each district based on the preferences of the electors who reside…
Citizens' assemblies need to represent subpopulations according to their proportions in the general population. These large committees are often constructed in an online fashion by contacting people, asking for the demographic features of…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process for allocating funds to projects based on the votes of community members. PB outcomes are commonly evaluated for how they reflect voters preferences (e.g., social welfare) and the extent…
This paper introduces Propose or Vote (PoV), a democratic procedure for collective decision-making and elections that does not rely on a central mechanism designer. In the first stage, members of a polity choose whether to become…
The goal of multi-winner elections is to choose a fixed-size committee based on voters' preferences. An important concern in this setting is representation: large groups of voters with cohesive preferences should be adequately represented…
We study situations where a group of voters need to take a collective decision over a number of public issues, with the goal of getting a result that reflects the voters' opinions in a proportional manner. Our focus is on interconnected…
Population protocols are a relatively novel computational model in which very resource-limited anonymous agents interact in pairs with the goal of computing predicates. We consider the probabilistic version of this model, which naturally…
We consider a model where a subset of candidates must be selected based on voter preferences, subject to general constraints that specify which subsets are feasible. This model generalizes committee elections with diversity constraints,…
Proportional representation (PR) is a fundamental principle of many democracies world-wide which employ PR-based voting rules to elect their representatives. The normative properties of these voting rules however, are often only understood…
Direct democracy is often proposed as a possible solution to the 21st-century problems of democracy. However, this suggestion clashes with the size and complexity of 21st-century societies, entailing an excessive cognitive burden on voters,…
Apportionment is the task of assigning resources to entities with different entitlements in a fair manner, and specifically a manner that is as proportional as possible. The best-known application is the assignment of parliamentary seats to…
We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a…
Participatory budgeting engages the public in the process of allocating public money to different types of projects. PB designs differ in how voters are asked to express their preferences over candidate projects and how these preferences…
In this paper we discuss the problems of modern representative democracy and we look at the selection of legislators by lot as a way to tame some of the drawbacks of that system. It is recalled at the beginning that resorting to sortition…
Liquid democracy is the principle of making collective decisions by letting agents transitively delegate their votes. Despite its significant appeal, it has become apparent that a weakness of liquid democracy is that a small subset of…
In approval-based multiwinner voting, voters express approval preferences over a set of candidates, and the goal is to return a winning committee. This model captures a broad range of subset selection problems under preferences. Prior work…
We consider a committee voting on whether to adopt a reform under a quota rule, where members differ in how much they value the reform some supporting it, others opposing it. We examine how members can influence each other's votes through…