Related papers: Pandering in a Flexible Representative Democracy
We introduce Flexible Representative Democracy (FRD), a novel hybrid of Representative Democracy (RD) and Direct Democracy (DD) in which voters can alter the issue-dependent weights of a set of elected representatives. In line with the…
This paper introduces the Voting with Random Proposers (VRP) procedure to address the challenges of agenda manipulation in voting. In each round of VRP, a randomly selected proposer suggests an alternative that is voted on against the…
Every representative democracy must specify a mechanism under which voters choose their representatives. The most common mechanism in the United States -- Winner takes all single-member districts -- both enables substantial partisan…
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…
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…
In parliamentary elections, parties compete for a limited, typically fixed number of seats. Most parliaments are assembled using apportionment methods that distribute the seats based on the parties' vote counts. Common apportionment methods…
Strategic manipulation of elections is typically studied in the context of promoting individual candidates. In parliamentary elections, however, the focus shifts: voters may care more about the overall governing coalition than the…
There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…
Mechanism design is concerned with settings where a policymaker (or social planner) faces the problem of aggregating the announced preferences of multiple agents into a collective (or social), system-wide decision. One of the most important…
We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interference by third parties. For example, suppose votes have been cast in an election between two candidates, and then each vote is randomly changed with a small…
Liquid democracy is the principle of making collective decisions by letting agents transitively delegate their votes. Despite its significant appeal, it has become apparent that a weakness of liquid democracy is that a small subset of…
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…
We consider synchronous iterative voting, where voters are given the opportunity to strategically choose their ballots depending on the outcome deduced from the previous collective choices.We propose two settings for synchronous iterative…
We analyse strategic, complete information, sequential voting with ordinal preferences over the alternatives. We consider several voting mechanisms: plurality voting and approval voting with deterministic or uniform tie-breaking rules. We…
Switching from one electoral system to another one is frequently criticized by the opposition and is viewed as a means for the ruling party to stay in power. In particular, when the new electoral system is a parallel voting (or a…
Democracy often fails to meet its ideals, and these failures may be made worse by electoral institutions. Unwanted outcomes include polarized institutions, unresponsive representatives, and the ability of a faction of voters to gain power…
Gerrymandering, the deliberate manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is a persistent issue in U.S. redistricting cycles. This paper introduces and analyzes a new phenomenon, 'votemandering'- a strategic…
Democratic societies increasingly rely on communication networks to aggregate citizen preferences and information, yet these same networks can systematically mislead voters under certain conditions. We introduce an agent-based model that…
Fairness in multiwinner elections, a growing line of research in computational social choice, primarily concerns the use of constraints to ensure fairness. Recent work proposed a model to find a diverse \emph{and} representative committee…
In this paper, we study liquid democracy, a collective decision making paradigm which lies between direct and representative democracy. One main feature of liquid democracy is that voters can delegate their votes in a transitive manner so…