Related papers: Electing the Executive Branch
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
As the world's democratic institutions are challenged by dissatisfied citizens, political scientists and also computer scientists have proposed and analyzed various (innovative) methods to select representative bodies, a crucial task in…
A voting center is in charge of collecting and aggregating voter preferences. In an iterative process, the center sends comparison queries to voters, requesting them to submit their preference between two items. Voters might discuss the…
There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…
Proportional representation plays a crucial role in electoral systems. In ordinal elections, where voters rank candidates based on their preferences, the Single Transferable Vote (STV) is the most widely used proportional voting method. STV…
We study a model of a population making a binary decision based on information spreading within the population, which is fully connected or covering a square grid. We assume that a fraction of the population wants to make the choice of the…
We consider an agent community wishing to decide on several binary issues by means of issue-by-issue majority voting. For each issue and each agent, one of the two options is better than the other. However, some of the agents may be…
We study a budget aggregation setting where voters express their preferred allocation of a fixed budget over a set of alternatives, and a mechanism aggregates these preferences into a single output allocation. Motivated by scenarios in…
We investigate efficient ways for the incorporation of liquid democracy into election settings in which voters submit cumulative ballots, i.e., when each voter is assigned a virtual coin that she can then distribute as she wishes among the…
We study a model of temporal voting where there is a fixed time horizon, and at each round the voters report their preferences over the available candidates and a single candidate is selected. Prior work has adapted popular notions of…
Most democratic countries use election methods to transform election results into whole numbers which usually give the number of seats in a legislative body the parties obtained. Which election method does this best can be specified by…
The responsibility gap is a set of outcomes of a collective decision-making mechanism in which no single agent is individually responsible. In general, when designing a decision-making process, it is desirable to minimise the gap. The paper…
An important problem in computational social choice theory is the complexity of undesirable behavior among agents, such as control, manipulation, and bribery in election systems. These kinds of voting strategies are often tempting at the…
The paper considers a general model of electoral systems combining district-based elections with a compensatory mechanism in order to create any outcome between strictly majoritarian and purely proportional seat allocation. It contains vote…
This paper considers elections in which voters choose one candidate each, independently according to known probability distributions. A candidate receiving a strict majority (absolute or relative, depending on the version) wins. After the…
Does electoral replacement ensure that officeholders eventually act in voters' interests? We study a reputational model of accountability. Voters observe incumbents' performance and decide whether to replace them. Politicians may be "good"…
Platforms for online civic participation rely heavily on methods for condensing thousands of comments into a relevant handful, based on whether participants agree or disagree with them. These methods should guarantee fair representation of…
In multiagent settings where the agents have different preferences, preference aggregation is a central issue. Voting is a general method for preference aggregation, but seminal results have shown that all general voting protocols are…
Citizens' assemblies are an increasingly influential form of deliberative democracy, where randomly selected people discuss policy questions. The legitimacy of these assemblies hinges on their representation of the broader population, but…
The budget is the key means for effecting policy in democracies, yet its preparation is typically an excluding, opaque, and arcane process. We aim to rectify this by providing for the democratic creation of complete budgets --- for…