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We study how office-seeking parties use direct democracy to shape elections. A party with a strong electoral base can benefit from using a binding referendum to resolve issues that divide its core supporters. When referendums do not bind,…
We investigate the ordering dynamics of the voter model with time-delayed interactions. The dynamical process in the $d$-dimensional lattice is shown to be equivalent to the first passage problem of a random walker in the…
In opinion dynamics, time delays in agent-to-agent interactions are ubiquitous, which can substantially disrupt the dynamical processes rooted in agents' opinion exchange, decision-making, and feedback mechanisms. However, a thorough…
Consider a community where initially, each individual is positive or negative regarding a reform proposal. In each round, individuals gather randomly in fixed rooms of different sizes, and all individuals in a room agree on the majority…
Participatory budgeting is one of the exciting developments in deliberative grassroots democracy. We concentrate on approval elections and propose proportional representation axioms in participatory budgeting, by generalizing relevant…
This report first provides a brief review of various forms of dialogue-based participation, e.g., Citizen Assembly, Citizen Lottery, Citizen Jury, Deliberative Polling, and Participatory Budgeting. Challenges associated with these…
Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…
Partisan gerrymandering poses a threat to democracy. Moreover, the complexity of the districting task may exceed human capacities. One potential solution is using computational models to automate the districting process by optimizing…
A key promise of democratic voting is that, by accounting for all constituents' preferences, it produces decisions that benefit the constituency overall. It is alarming, then, that all deterministic voting rules have unbounded distortion:…
Decisions about how the population of the United States should be divided into legislative districts have powerful and not fully understood effects on the outcomes of elections. The problem of understanding what we might mean by "fair…
Consider an undirected graph G, representing a social network, where each node is blue or red, corresponding to positive or negative opinion on a topic. In the voter model, in discrete time rounds, each node picks a neighbour uniformly at…
We study vote delegation with "well-behaving" and "misbehaving" agents and compare it with conventional voting. Typical examples for vote delegation are validation or governance tasks on blockchains. There is a majority of well-behaving…
LLMs are among the most advanced tools ever devised for understanding and generating natural language. Democratic deliberation and decision-making involve, at several distinct stages, the production and comprehension of language. So it is…
We investigate opinion dynamics in multi-agent networks when a bias toward one of two possible opinions exists; for example, reflecting a status quo vs a superior alternative. Starting with all agents sharing an initial opinion representing…
The right to contest a decision with consequences on individuals or the society is a well-established democratic right. Despite this right also being explicitly included in GDPR in reference to automated decision-making, its study seems to…
Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of…
We study the effect of latency on binary-choice opinion formation models. Latency is introduced into the models as an additional dynamic rule: after a voter changes its opinion, it enters a waiting period of stochastic length where no…
Bots have become increasingly prevalent in the digital sphere and have taken up a proactive role in shaping democratic processes. While previous studies have focused on their influence at the individual level, their potential macro-level…
Consider the decision-making setting where agents elect a panel by expressing both positive and negative preferences. Prominently, in constitutional AI, citizens democratically select a slate of ethical preferences on which a foundation…
The outcomes of democratic elections rest on individuals' decision-making that is driven by their varying preferences and beliefs. Individuals may prefer consensus to gridlock, or gridlock to consensus, and information may be fractured via…