Related papers: As Time Goes By: Adding a Temporal Dimension Towar…
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…
Spatial voting models of legislators' preferences are used in political science to test theories about their voting behavior. These models posit that legislators' ideologies as well as the ideologies reflected in votes for and against a…
The legitimacy of bottom-up democratic processes for the distribution of public funds by policy-makers is challenging and complex. Participatory budgeting is such a process, where voting outcomes may not always be fair or inclusive.…
AI is increasingly used to scale collective decision-making, but far less attention has been paid to how such systems can support procedural legitimacy, particularly the conditions shaping losers' consent: whether participants who do not…
The voter model is a classical interacting particle system modelling how consensus is formed across a network. We analyse the time to consensus for the voter model when the underlying graph is a subcritical scale-free random graph.…
This white paper outlines a long-term scientific vision for the development of digital-democracy technology. We contend that if digital democracy is to meet the ambition of enabling a participatory renewal in our societies, then a…
We study finite-size effects on the convergence time in a continuous-opinion dynamics model. In the model, each individual's opinion is represented by a real number on a finite interval, e.g., $[0,1]$, and a uniformly randomly chosen…
The diffusion of opinions in Social Networks is a relevant process for adopting positions and attracting potential voters in political campaigns. Opinion polarization, bias, targeted diffusion, and the radicalization of postures are key…
This position paper argues that effectively "democratizing AI" requires democratic governance and alignment of AI, and that this is particularly valuable for decisions with systemic societal impacts. Initial steps -- such as Meta's…
We consider binary group decision-making under a rich model of liquid democracy recently proposed by Colley, Grandi, and Novaro (2022): agents submit ranked delegation options, where each option may be a function of multiple agents' votes;…
Given the stated preferences of several people over a number of proposals regarding public policy initiatives, some of those proposals might be judged to be more ``divisive'' than others. When designing online participatory platforms to…
Motivated by the problem of partisan gerrymandering, we introduce an electoral system for a representative democracy called democratic cellular voting, designed to make modern packing and cracking strategies irrelevant by allowing districts…
This article shows how fair voting methods can be a catalyst for change in the way we make collective decisions, and how such change can promote long-awaited upgrades of democracy. Based on real-world evidence from democratic innovations in…
A wide range of participation is essential for democracy, as it helps prevent the dominance of extreme views, erosion of legitimacy, and political polarization. However, engagement in online political discussions often features a limited…
Election control considers the problem of an adversary who attempts to tamper with a voting process, in order to either ensure that their favored candidate wins (constructive control) or another candidate loses (destructive control). As…
Many real-world scenarios require the random selection of one or more individuals from a pool of eligible candidates. One example of especial social relevance refers to the legal system, in which the jurors and judges are commonly picked…
This article is concerned with a general class of stochastic spatial models for the dynamics of opinions. Like in the voter model, individuals are located on the vertex set of a connected graph and update their opinion at a constant rate…
The increasing relevance of areas such as real-time and embedded systems, pervasive computing, hybrid systems control, and biological and social systems modeling is bringing a growing attention to the temporal aspects of computing, not only…
In multiple-question referendum elections, the separability problem occurs when a voter's preferences on some questions or proposals depend on the predicted outcomes of others. The notion of separability formalizes the study of…
The current social reality is characterized by all-encompassing change, which disrupts existing social structures at all levels. Yet the prevailing view of society is based on the ontological primacy of stable hierarchical structures, which…