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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…
The problem of reliable democratic governance is important for survival of any community, and it will be more critical over time communities with levels of social connectivity in society rapidly increasing with speeds and scales of…
In recent years, political parties have adopted Online Delegative Democracy platforms such as LiquidFeedback to organise themselves and their political agendas via a grassroots approach. A common objection against the use of these platforms…
How to elect the representatives in legislative bodies is a question that every modern democracy has to answer. This design task has to consider various elements so as to fulfill the citizens' expectations and contribute to the maintenance…
Deliberative democracy arguably leads to better collective decisions, but is fundamentally constrained by human attention and bandwidth. While recent AI-mediated deliberations scale participation by synthesizing inputs from many humans,…
We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are…
Computational social choice and algorithmic decision theory offer rich aggregation theory but no comprehensive process for egalitarian self-governance: aggregation, deliberation, amendment, and consensus are each considered in isolation,…
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…
Public confidence in democratic institutions has declined across many OECD countries over recent decades, while political participation and policy influence remain unevenly distributed across socioeconomic groups. Concurrently, democratic…
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…
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…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…
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…
Speaking or writing of political assemblies tends to evoke the action of people gathering to deliberate, or the spaces in which this deliberation might take place. One thing that is often overlooked, however, is the fact that these spaces…
We study wisdom of the crowd effects in liquid democracy when agents are allowed to apportion weights to proxies by mixing their delegations. We show that in this setting -- unlike in the standard one where votes are always delegated in…
This chapter explores the influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on digital democracy, focusing on four main areas: citizenship, participation, representation, and the public sphere. It traces the evolution from electronic to virtual and…
Permanent citizens' assemblies are ongoing deliberative bodies composed of randomly selected citizens, organized into panels that rotate over time. Unlike one-off panels, which represent the population in a single snapshot, permanent…
This article unpacks the design choices behind longstanding and newly proposed computational frameworks aimed at finding common grounds across collective preferences and examines their potential future impacts, both technically and…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
The paper develops a theory of power for delegable proxy voting systems. We define a power index able to measure the influence of both voters and delegators. Using this index, which we characterize axiomatically, we extend an earlier…