Related papers: Negative votes to depolarize politics
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…
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 study strategic candidate nomination by parties in elections decided by Plurality voting. Each party selects a nominee before the election, and the winner is chosen from the nominated candidates based on the voters' preferences. We…
Election poll reporting often focuses on mean values and only subordinately discusses the underlying uncertainty. Subsequent interpretations are too often phrased as certain. Moreover, media coverage rarely adequately takes into account the…
We introduce a simple, geometric model of opinion polarization. It is a model of political persuasion, as well as marketing and advertising, utilizing social values. It focuses on the interplay between different topics and persuasion…
We revisit the recent breakthrough result of Gkatzelis et al. on (single-winner) metric voting, which showed that the optimal distortion of 3 can be achieved by a mechanism called Plurality Matching. The rule picks an arbitrary candidate…
We view voting rules as classifiers that assign a winner (a class) to a profile of voters' preferences (an instance). We propose to apply techniques from formal explainability, most notably abductive and contrastive explanations, to…
Despite many examples to the contrary, most models of elections assume that rules determining the winner will be followed. We present a model where elections are solely a public signal of the incumbent popularity, and citizens can protests…
A survey can be represented by a bipartite network as it has two types of nodes, participants and items in which participants can only interact with items. We introduce an agreement threshold to take a minimal projection of the participants…
The increasing reliance on digital platforms shapes how individuals understand the world, as recommendation systems direct users toward content "similar" to their existing preferences. While this process simplifies information retrieval,…
Voting systems typically treat all voters equally. We argue that perhaps they should not: Voters who have supported good choices in the past should be given higher weight than voters who have supported bad ones. To develop a formal…
The traditional axiomatic approach to voting is motivated by the problem of reconciling differences in subjective preferences. In contrast, a dominant line of work in the theory of voting over the past 15 years has considered a different…
Classical spatial models predict platform convergence, yet empirical polarization persists. This paper proposes a non-electoral mechanism: lobbying as a monopsonistic market for legislative support. Here, extreme benefactors must pay more…
We examine the effects of introducing a political outsider to the nomination process leading to an election. To this end, we develop a sequential game where politicians -- insiders and outsiders -- make a platform offer to a party, and…
We study individuals' willingness to engage with others who hold opposite views on polarizing policies. A representative sample of 2,507 Americans are given the opportunity to listen to recordings of fellow countrymen and women expressing…
Political polarization in the US is on the rise. This polarization negatively affects the public sphere by contributing to the creation of ideological echo chambers. In this paper, we focus on addressing one of the factors that contributes…
An index is a function that given an election outputs a value between 0 and 1, indicating the extent to which this election has a particular feature. We seek indices that capture agreement, diversity, and polarization among voters in…
The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As a…
Polarization in American politics has been extensively documented and analyzed for decades, and the phenomenon became all the more apparent during the 2016 presidential election, where Trump and Clinton depicted two radically different…
Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…