Related papers: Fine-Grained Liquid Democracy for Cumulative Ballo…
Elections are the central institution of democratic processes, and often the elected body -- in either public or private governance -- is a committee of individuals. To ensure the legitimacy of elected bodies, the electoral processes should…
Voting methods are instrumental design elements of democracies. Citizens use them to express and aggregate their preferences to reach a collective decision. However, voting outcomes can be as sensitive to voting rules as they are to…
We present a deliberation model where a group of individuals with heterogeneous preferences iteratively forms expert committees whose members are tasked with the updating of an exogenously given status quo change proposal. Every individual…
Most modern recommendation systems use the approach of collaborative filtering: users that are believed to behave alike are used to produce recommendations. In this work we describe an application (Liquid FM) taking a completely different…
Many democratic societies use district-based elections, where the region under consideration is geographically divided into districts and a representative is chosen for each district based on the preferences of the electors who reside…
The paper provides an overview of core functionalities that digital democracy software needs to provide in order to support democratic deliberative processes at scale. Developing these functionalities poses novel computational challenges…
Democracy is not a single mechanism. It is a space of possible configurations -- a spectrum stretching from pure direct participation to full delegation of authority. The systems we live under today occupy a narrow band of that spectrum,…
Platforms for online civic participation rely heavily on methods for condensing thousands of comments into a relevant handful, based on whether participants agree or disagree with them. These methods should guarantee fair representation of…
We study vote delegation with "well-behaving" and "misbehaving" agents and compare it with conventional voting. Typical examples for vote delegation are validation or governance tasks on blockchains. There is a majority of well-behaving…
We develop and apply epistemic tests to various decentralized governance methods as well as to study the impact of participation. These tests probe the ability to reach a correct outcome when there is one. We find that partial abstention is…
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…
Online discussion platforms are a vital part of the public discourse in a deliberative democracy. However, how to interpret the outcomes of the discussions on these platforms is often unclear. In this paper, we propose a novel and…
A voting center is in charge of collecting and aggregating voter preferences. In an iterative process, the center sends comparison queries to voters, requesting them to submit their preference between two items. Voters might discuss the…
Participatory budgeting is one of the exciting developments in deliberative grassroots democracy. We concentrate on approval elections and propose proportional representation axioms in participatory budgeting, by generalizing relevant…
In this paper, we investigate the so-called ODP-problem that has been formulated by Caragiannis and Micha [10]. Here, we are in a setting with two election alternatives out of which one is assumed to be correct. In ODP, the goal is to…
When confronted with a host of issues, groups often save time and energy by compiling many issues into a single bundle when making decisions. This reduces the time and cost of group decision-making, but it also leads to suboptimal outcomes…
The major finding, of this article, is an ensemble method, but more exactly, a novel, better ranked voting system (and other variations of it), that aims to solve the problem of finding the best candidate to represent the voters. We have…
We present a new model that describes the process of electing a group of representatives (e.g., a parliament) for a group of voters. In this model, called the voting committee model, the elected group of representatives runs a number of…
We consider distributed elections, where there is a center and $k$ sites. In such distributed elections, each voter has preferences over some set of candidates, and each voter is assigned to exactly one site such that each site is aware…
A citizens' assembly is a group of people who are randomly selected to represent a larger population in a deliberation. While this approach has successfully strengthened democracy, it has certain limitations that suggest the need for…