Related papers: As Time Goes By: Adding a Temporal Dimension Towar…

During deliberation processes, mediators and facilitators typically need to select a small and representative set of opinions later used to produce digestible reports for stakeholders. In online deliberation platforms, algorithmic selection…

We study a temporal voting model where voters have dynamic preferences over a set of public chores -- projects that benefit society, but impose individual costs on those affected by their implementation. We investigate the computational…

This chapter introduces the concept of Collective Intelligence for Deliberative Democracy (CI4DD). We propose that the use of computational tools, specifically artificial intelligence to advance deliberative democracy, is an instantiation…

Technologies are increasingly enrolled in projects to involve civilians in the work of policy-making, often under the label of 'civic technology'. But conventional forms of participation through transactions such as voting provide limited…

Participatory Budgeting (PB) has evolved into a key democratic instrument for resource allocation in cities. Enabled by digital platforms, cities now have the opportunity to let citizens directly propose and vote on urban projects, using…

In this thesis we contribute to the understanding of the pivotal role of the temporal dimension in networked social systems, previously neglected and now uncovered by the data revolution recently blossomed in this field. To this aim, we…

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 explore the voter model dynamics on a directed random graph model ensemble (digraphs), given by the Directed Configuration Model. The voter model captures the evolution of opinions over time on a graph where each vertex represents an…

We introduce a voting model with multi-agent ranked delegations. This model generalises liquid democracy in two aspects: first, an agent's delegation can use the votes of multiple other agents to determine their own -- for instance, an…

The strength of democracy lies in the free and equal exchange of diverse viewpoints. Living up to this ideal at scale faces inherent tensions: broad participation, meaningful deliberation, and political equality often trade off with one…

Democratic processes increasingly aim to integrate large-scale voting with face-to-face deliberation, addressing the challenge of reconciling individual preferences with collective decision-making. This work introduces new methods that use…

This paper introduces Democracy-in-Silico, an agent-based simulation where societies of advanced AI agents, imbued with complex psychological personas, govern themselves under different institutional frameworks. We explore what it means to…

In recent years, opinion dynamics has received an increasing attention, and various models have been introduced and evaluated mainly by simulation. In this study, we introduce and study a dynamical model inspired by the so-called `bounded…

Digital deliberation has expanded democratic participation, yet challenges remain. This includes processing information at scale, moderating discussions, fact-checking, or attracting people to participate. Recent advances in artificial…

While LLMs have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in text generation and reasoning, their ability to simulate human decision-making -- particularly in political contexts -- remains an open question. However, modeling voter behavior…

Many societal decision problems lie in high-dimensional continuous spaces not amenable to the voting techniques common for their discrete or single-dimensional counterparts. These problems are typically discretized before running an…

Increased attention has been paid over the last four years to dynamic network embedding. Existing dynamic embedding methods, however, consider the problem as limited to the evolution of a topology over a sequence of global, discrete states.…

This chapter reviews empirical evidence bearing on the design of online forums for deliberative civic engagement. Dimensions of design are defined for different aspects of the deliberation: its purpose, the target population, the…

We focus on the potential fragility of democratic elections given modern information-communication technologies (ICT) in the Web 2.0 era. Our work provides an explanation for the cascading attrition of public officials recently in the…

The adaptive voter model is widely used to model opinion dynamics in social complex networks. However, existing adaptive voter models are limited to only pairwise interactions and fail to capture the intricate social dynamics that arises in…