Related papers: Maximal modularity and the optimal size of parliam…
We introduce a general framework for exploring the problem of selecting a committee of representatives with the aim of studying a networked voting rule based on a decentralized large-scale platform, which can assure a strong accountability…
We analyze the optimal size of a congress in a representative democracy. We take an epistemic view where voters decide on a binary issue with one ground truth outcome, and each voter votes correctly according to their competence levels in…
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 two-tier voting system and try to determine optimal weights for a fair representation in such systems. A prominent example of such a voting system is the Council of Ministers of the European Union. Under the assumption of…
The Constitutionally mandated task of assigning Congressional seats to the various U.S. States proportional to their represented populations ("according to their numbers") has engendered much contention, but rather less consensus. Using the…
We investigate systems of indirect voting based on the law of Penrose, in which each representative in the voting body receives the number of votes (voting weight) proportional to the square root of the population he or she represents. For…
We propose a bare-bones stochastic model that takes into account both the geographical distribution of people within a country and their complex network of connections. The model, which is designed to give rise to a scale-free network of…
In societal-scale decision-making systems the collective is faced with the problem of ensuring that the derived group decision is in accord with the collective's intention. In modern systems, political institutions have instatiated…
The problem of designing an optimal weighted voting system for the two-tier voting, applicable in the case of the Council of Ministers of the European Union (EU), is investigated. Various arguments in favour of the square root voting…
Systems of indirect voting based on the principle of qualified majority can be analysed using the methods of game theory. In particular, this applies to the voting system in the Council of the European Union, which was recently a subject of…
Distribution of seats in The European Parliament postulated by Treaty of Lisbon should be degressively proportional. The meaning of degressively proportional concept can be found in two principles annexed to the draft of European Parliament…
We consider three algorithms for allocating parliamentary seats by proportional representation. The usual approach to describing such algorithms is to compute a quota of votes that each party uses to "acquire'' representatives. This kind of…
This paper revisits a fundamental distributed computing problem in the population protocol model. Provided $n$ agents each starting with an input color in $[k]$, the relative majority problem asks to find the predominant color. In the…
We consider the problem of counting the population size in the population model. In this model, we are given a distributed system of $n$ identical agents which interact in pairs with the goal to solve a common task. In each time step, the…
In light of the classic impossibility results of Arrow and Gibbard and Satterthwaite regarding voting with ordinal rules, there has been recent interest in characterizing how well common voting rules approximate the social optimum. In order…
The quality of governance of institutions, corporations and countries depends on the ability of efficient decision making within the respective boards or cabinets. Opinion formation processes within groups are size dependent. It is often…
Nowadays there is an increasing interest of physicists in finding regularities related to social phenomena. This interest is clearly motivated by applications that a statistical mechanical description of the human behavior may have in our…
When modelling metapopulation dynamics, the influence of a single patch on the metapopulation depends on the number of individuals in the patch. Since the population size has no natural upper limit, this leads to systems in which there are…
A general multi-type population model is considered, where individuals live and reproduce according to their age and type, but also under the influence of the size and composition of the entire population. We describe the dynamics of the…
How to elect the representatives in legislative bodies is a question that every modern democracy has to answer. This design task has to consider various elements so as to fulfill the citizens' expectations and contribute to the maintenance…