Related papers: Spoiler Susceptibility in Party Elections

When can an interest group exploit polarization between political parties to its advantage? Building upon Battaglini and Patacchini (2018), we study a model where an interest group credibly promises payments to legislators conditional on…

Election rules are formal processes that aggregate voters preferences, typically to select a single candidate, called the winner. Most of the election rules studied in the literature require the voters to rank the candidates from the most…

Some argue that political stability is best served through a two-party system. This study refutes this. The author mathematically defines the stability and rigidity of electoral systems comprised of any quantity of electors and parties. In…

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…

The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…

We consider manipulation problems when the manipulator only has partial information about the votes of the nonmanipulators. Such partial information is described by an information set, which is the set of profiles of the nonmanipulators…

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…

What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good,…

Social choice theory is a theoretical framework for analysis of combining individual preferences, interests, or welfare to reach a collective decision or social welfare in some sense. We introduce a new criterion for social choice protocols…

Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. The sources of influence can be generally divided into external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An…

We define and study obvious strategy-proofness with respect to a partition of the set of agents. It encompasses strategy-proofness as a special case when the partition is the coarsest one and obvious strategy-proofness when the partition is…

The two most common types of electoral systems (ES) used in electing national legislatures are proportional representation and plurality voting. When they are evaluated, most often the arguments come from social choice theory and political…

We consider a model where a subset of candidates must be selected based on voter preferences, subject to general constraints that specify which subsets are feasible. This model generalizes committee elections with diversity constraints,…

Political actors often manipulate redistricting plans to gain electoral advantages, a process known as gerrymandering. Several states have implemented institutional reforms to address this problem, such as establishing map-drawing…

Behavioural equivalences can be characterized via bisimulation, modal logics, and spoiler-duplicator games. In this paper we work in the general setting of coalgebra and focus on generic algorithms for computing the winning strategies of…

We consider a social choice problem where only a small number of people out of a large population are sufficiently available or motivated to vote. A common solution to increase participation is to allow voters use a proxy, that is, transfer…

We study elections where voters are faced with the challenge of expressing preferences over an extreme number of issues under consideration. This is largely motivated by emerging blockchain governance systems, which include voters with…

Prior work on the complexity of bribery assumes that the bribery happens simultaneously, and that the briber has full knowledge of all voters' votes. But neither of those assumptions always holds. In many real-world settings, votes come in…

In many real world elections, agents are not required to rank all candidates. We study three of the most common methods used to modify voting rules to deal with such partial votes. These methods modify scoring rules (like the Borda count),…

The hypothesis of selective exposure assumes that people seek out information that supports their views and eschew information that conflicts with their beliefs, and that has negative consequences on our society. Few researchers have…