Related papers: Optimizing Viscous Democracy
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…
We study elections where voters are faced with the challenge of expressing preferences over an extreme number of issues under consideration. This is largely motivated by emerging blockchain governance systems, which include voters with…
The two most common types of electoral systems (ES) used in electing national legislatures are proportional representation and plurality voting. When they are evaluated, most often the arguments come from social choice theory and political…
Viscous fingering is a well-known hydrodynamic instability that sets in when a less viscous fluid displaces a more viscous fluid. When the two fluids are miscible, viscous fingering introduces disorder in the velocity field and exerts a…
In linear models of consensus dynamics, the state of the various agents converges to a value which is a convex combination of the agents' initial states. We call it democratic if in the large scale limit (number of agents going to infinity)…
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…
Viscous streaming is an efficient rectification mechanism to exploit flow inertia at small scales for fluid and particle manipulation. It typically entails a fluid vibrating around an immersed solid feature that, by concentrating stresses,…
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…
Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so (Galileo Galilei). According to the above sentence we do not ask why we need to measure democracy but if it is possible to measure something which is not unequivocally defined.…
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…
Viscous fingering of a miscible high viscosity slice of fluid displaced by a lower viscosity fluid is studied in porous media by direct numerical simulations of Darcy's law coupled to the evolution equation for the concentration of a solute…
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…
What are the value and form of optimal persuasion when information can be generated only slowly? We study this question in a dynamic model in which a 'sender' provides public information over time subject to a graduality constraint, and a…
Uncertainty persists over how and why some countries become democratic and others do not, or why some countries remain democratic and others 'backslide' toward autocracy. Furthermore, while scholars generally agree on the nature of…
Integrity of elections is vital to democratic systems, but it is frequently threatened by malicious actors. The study of algorithmic complexity of the problem of manipulating election outcomes by changing its structural features is known as…
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…
Voting is a simple mechanism to aggregate the preferences of agents. Many voting rules have been shown to be NP-hard to manipulate. However, a number of recent theoretical results suggest that this complexity may only be in the worst-case…
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…
Direct democracy is often proposed as a possible solution to the 21st-century problems of democracy. However, this suggestion clashes with the size and complexity of 21st-century societies, entailing an excessive cognitive burden on voters,…
Democratic societies increasingly rely on communication networks to aggregate citizen preferences and information, yet these same networks can systematically mislead voters under certain conditions. We introduce an agent-based model that…