Related papers: The Optimal Size of an Epistemic Congress
An important question in representative democracies is how to determine the optimal parliament size of a given country. According to an old conjecture, known as the cubic root law, there is a fairly universal power-law relation, with an…
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…
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…
The pursuit of truth is central to democratic deliberation and governance, yet political discourse reflects varying epistemic orientations, ranging from evidence-based reasoning grounded in verifiable information to intuition-based…
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…
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…
Medical and population health science researchers frequently make ambiguous statements about whether they believe their study sample or results are "representative" of some (implicit or explicit) target population. Here, we provide a…
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…
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…
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…
A population of voters must elect representatives among themselves to decide on a sequence of possibly unforeseen binary issues. Voters care only about the final decision, not the elected representatives. The disutility of a voter is…
Statistical samples, in order to be representative, have to be drawn from a population in a random and unbiased way. Nevertheless, it is common practice in the field of model-based diagnosis to make estimations from (biased) best-first…
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…
We study the classical discursive dilemma from the point of view of finding the best decision rule according to a quantitative criterion, under very mild restrictions on the set of admissible rules. The members of the deciding committee are…
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…
We initiate the study of voting rules for participatory budgeting using the so-called epistemic approach, where one interprets votes as noisy reflections of some ground truth regarding the objectively best set of projects to fund. Using…
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 dynamics of random transitive delegations on a graph are of particular interest when viewed through the lens of an emerging voting paradigm, liquid democracy. This paradigm allows voters to choose between directly voting and…
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…
Over the last few years, researchers have put significant effort into understanding of the notion of proportional representation in committee election. In particular, recently they have proposed the notion of proportionality degree. We…