Related papers: Vulnerability of democratic electoral systems
Politics around the world exhibits increasing polarization, demonstrated in part by rigid voting configurations in institutions like legislatures or courts. A crux of polarization is separation along a unidimensional ideological axis, but…
It is well known that no reasonable voting rule is strategyproof. Moreover, the common Plurality rule is particularly prone to strategic behavior of the voters and empirical studies show that people often vote strategically in practice.…
The challenge of understanding the collective behaviors of social systems can benefit from methods and concepts from physics [1-6], not because humans are similar to electrons, but because certain large-scale behaviors can be understood…
Voting rules may implement the will of the society when all eligible voters vote, and only them. However, they may fail to do so when sybil (fake or duplicate) votes are present and when only some honest (non sybil) voters actively…
Polarization is a major concern for a well-functioning society. Often, mass polarization of a society is driven by polarizing political representation, even when the latter is easily preventable. The existing computational social choice…
Voting mechanisms are widely accepted and used methods for decentralized decision-making. Ensuring the acceptance of the voting mechanism's outcome is a crucial characteristic of robust voting systems. Consider this scenario: A group of…
We present a new strategic voting model where we use uncertainty representation to model preferences. Specifically, we use probability sets as uncertainty representations, together with lower and upper expected utility gains to take…
Participatory budgeting, as a paradigm for democratic innovations, engages citizens in the distribution of a public budget to projects, which they propose and vote for implementation. So far, voting algorithms have been proposed and studied…
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…
Constructive election control considers the problem of an adversary who seeks to sway the outcome of an electoral process in order to ensure that their favored candidate wins. We consider the computational problem of constructive election…
Strategic manipulation of elections is typically studied in the context of promoting individual candidates. In parliamentary elections, however, the focus shifts: voters may care more about the overall governing coalition than the…
We study the behavior of Range Voting and Normalized Range Voting with respect to electoral control. Electoral control encompasses attempts from an election chair to alter the structure of an election in order to change the outcome. We show…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
A critical issue for society today is the emergence and decline of democracy worldwide. It is unclear, however, how democratic features, such as elections and civil liberties, influence this change. Democracy indices, which are the standard…
Representative democracy in the United States relies on election systems that transmit votes into representatives in three key bodies: the two chambers of the federal legislature (House of Representatives and Senate) and the Electoral…
We study a model of temporal voting where there is a fixed time horizon, and at each round the voters report their preferences over the available candidates and a single candidate is selected. Prior work has adapted popular notions of…
We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…
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:…
Proportional representation (PR) is a fundamental principle of many democracies world-wide which employ PR-based voting rules to elect their representatives. The normative properties of these voting rules however, are often only understood…
We describe an electoral system for distributing seats in a parliament. It gives proportionality for the political parties and close to proportionality for constituencies. The system suggested here is a version of the system used in Sweden…