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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…
Social choice theory is the study of preference aggregation across a population, used both in mechanism design for human agents and in the democratic alignment of language models. In this study, we propose the representative social choice…
We analyse optimal voting weights in two-tier voting systems. In our model, the overall population (or union) is split in groups (or member states) of different sizes. The individuals comprising the overall population constitute the first…
The division of mandates to the European Parliament posed difficulties since the beginning of its operation. Introduction of the degressive proportionality principle to legal acts intensified further discussion on this subject. The…
Elections constitute a paradigm of decision-making problems that have puzzled experts of different disciplines for decades. We study two decision-making problems, where groups make decisions that impact only themselves as a group. In both…
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…
Population protocols are a model of distributed computation intended for the study of networks of independent computing agents with dynamic communication structure. Each agent has a finite number of states, and communication opportunities…
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…
Parliaments dominated by two political blocs often face legislative inefficiencies as polarization increases. A central institutional question concerns how majority and supermajority rules interact with parliamentary composition to balance…
We study a few dynamical systems composed of many components whose sizes evolve according to multiplicative stochastic rules. We compare them with respect to the emergence of power laws in the size distribution of their components. We show…
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…
We build networks of genetic similarity in which the nodes are organisms sampled from biological populations. The procedure is illustrated by constructing networks from genetic data of a marine clonal plant. An important feature in the…
We consider a dynamic collective choice problem where a large number of players are cooperatively choosing between multiple destinations while being influenced by the behavior of the group. For example, in a robotic swarm exploring a new…
Universality in the behavior of complex systems often reveals itself in the form of scale-invariant distributions that are essentially independent of the details of the microscopic dynamics. A representative paradigm of complex behavior in…
Consider n individuals who, by popular vote, choose among q >= 2 alternatives, one of which is "better" than the others. Assume that each individual votes independently at random, and that the probability of voting for the better…
In certain bodies, like the Council of the EU, the member states have a voting weight which depends on the population of the re- spective state. In this article we ask the question which voting weight guarantees a `fair' representation of…
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…
Citizens' assemblies are a form of democratic innovation in which a randomly selected panel of constituents deliberates on questions of public interest. We study a novel goal for the selection of panel members: maximizing the entropy of the…
The Council of the European Union (EU) is one of the main decision-making bodies of the EU. A number of decisions require a qualified majority, the support of 55% of the member states (currently 15) that represent at least 65% of the total…
Winner selection by majority, in an election between two candidates, is the only rule compatible with democratic principles. Instead, when the candidates are three or more and the voters rank candidates in order of preference, there are no…