Related papers: Pandering in a Flexible Representative Democracy
This paper is devoted to the application of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics to social (political) science. By using the quantum dynamical equations we model the process of decision making in US elections. The crucial point…
When each voter rates or ranks several candidates for a single office, a strong Condorcet winner (SCW) is one who beats all others in two-way races. Among 21 electoral systems examined, 18 will sometimes make candidate X the winner even if…
We analyze the evolution of political organizations using a model in which agents change their opinions via two competing mechanisms. Two agents may interact and reach consensus, and additionally, individual agents may spontaneously change…
We consider the coupled dynamics of the adaption of network structure and the evolution of strategies played by individuals occupying the network vertices. We propose a computational model in which each agent plays a $n$-round Prisoner's…
How can voters induce politicians to put forth more proximate (in terms of preference) as well as credible platforms (in terms of promise fulfillment) under repeated elections? Building on the work of Aragones et al. (2007), I study how…
The term "diffusion of responsibility'' refers to situations in which multiple agents share responsibility for an outcome, obscuring individual accountability. This paper examines this frequently undesirable phenomenon in the context of…
Direct democracy is often proposed as a possible solution to the 21st-century problems of democracy. However, this suggestion clashes with the size and complexity of 21st-century societies, entailing an excessive cognitive burden on voters,…
Voting advice applications (VAAs) help millions of voters understand which political parties or candidates best align with their views. This paper explores the potential risks these applications pose to the democratic process when targeted…
We study the properties of elections that have a given position matrix (in such elections each candidate is ranked on each position by a number of voters specified in the matrix). We show that counting elections that generate a given…
We study social choice mechanisms in an implicit utilitarian framework with a metric constraint, where the goal is to minimize \textit{Distortion}, the worst case social cost of an ordinal mechanism relative to underlying cardinal…
Liquid democracy is a collective decision making paradigm which lies between direct and representative democracy. One of its main features is that voters can delegate their votes in a transitive manner such that: A delegates to B and B…
We focus on the election manipulation problem through social influence, where a manipulator exploits a social network to make her most preferred candidate win an election. Influence is due to information in favor of and/or against one or…
We develop a theory of distributive competition under redistricting that explains both electoral outcomes and the equilibrium allocation of policy benefits by endogenizing voter pivotality. In a multi-district model with primaries, general…
Electoral control models ways of changing the outcome of an election via such actions as adding/deleting/partitioning either candidates or voters. These actions modify an election's participation structure and aim at either making a…
We study the effect of strategic behavior in iterative voting for multiple issues under uncertainty. We introduce a model synthesizing simultaneous multi-issue voting with Meir, Lev, and Rosenschein (2014)'s local dominance theory and…
Collusion occurs when multiple malicious participants of a distributed protocol work together to sabotage or spy on honest participants. Decentralized protocols often rely on a subset of participants called workers for critical operations.…
In this paper we examine a variant of the voter model on a dynamically changing network where agents have the option of changing their friends rather than changing their opinions. We analyse, in the context of dense random graphs, two…
The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum,…
Diffusion policies are a powerful paradigm for robotic control, but fine-tuning them with human preferences is fundamentally challenged by the multi-step structure of the denoising process. To overcome this, we introduce a Unified Markov…
The American winner-take-all congressional district system empowers politicians to engineer electoral outcomes by manipulating district boundaries. Existing computational solutions mostly focus on drawing unbiased maps by ignoring political…