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We study how electoral rules shape polarization dynamics when voters and candidates both adapt to repeated election outcomes. We introduce two geometric primitives for comparing rules under this feedback: the \emph{winner radius} $R_t =…
This article expands on the redistricting algorithm proposed by Chen and Rodden (2015) for states with fewer than eight congressional districts, populations highly concentrated in urban areas, or state laws that require preservation of…
Deciding whether a political districting plan was distorted by a hidden agenda, or whether it dilutes the voting power of some group, requires a neutral baseline for comparison. Remarkably, all nine U.S. Supreme Court justices have now…
Gerrymandering voting districts is one of the most salient concerns of contemporary American society, and the creation of new voting maps, along with their subsequent legal challenges, speaks for much of our modern political discourse. The…
We present $\varepsilon$-retrain, an exploration strategy encouraging a behavioral preference while optimizing policies with monotonic improvement guarantees. To this end, we introduce an iterative procedure for collecting retrain areas --…
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:…
Redistricting practitioners must balance many competing constraints and criteria when drawing district boundaries. To aid in this process, researchers have developed many methods for optimizing districting plans according to one or more…
This work researches the impact of including a wider range of participants in the strategy-making process on the performance of organizations which operate in either moderately or highly complex environments. Agent-based simulation…
The vast majority of US public school districts use school attendance boundaries to determine which student addresses are assigned to which schools. Existing work shows how redrawing boundaries can be a powerful policy lever for increasing…
Delegation allows an agent to request that another agent completes a task. In many situations the task may be delegated onwards, and this process can repeat until it is eventually, successfully or unsuccessfully, performed. We consider…
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…
Recently, many matching systems around the world have been reformed. These reforms responded to objections that the matching mechanisms in use were unfair and manipulable. Surprisingly, the mechanisms remained unfair even after the reforms:…
Partisan gerrymandering, i.e., manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is one of the major challenges to election integrity in modern day democracies. Yet most of the existing methods for detecting partisan…
Independent voters play an increasingly decisive role in contemporary elections, yet their collective behavior remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how a minority of voters with greater flexibility in their political…
The goal of this paper is twofold. First and foremost, we aim to experimentally and quantitatively show that the choice of a multiwinner voting rule can play a crucial role on the way minorities are represented. We also test the possibility…
If checks and balances are aimed at protecting citizens from the government's abuse of power, why do they sometimes weaken them? We address this question in a laboratory experiment in which subjects choose between two decision rules: with…
We study positional voting rules when candidates and voters are embedded in a common metric space, and cardinal preferences are naturally given by distances in the metric space. In a positional voting rule, each candidate receives a score…
Geographical considerations such as contiguity and compactness are necessary elements of political districting in practice. Yet an analysis of the problem without such constraints yields mathematical insights that can inform real-world…
In this work the properties of minority games containing agents which try to winning all the time are studied by means of computational simulations. We have considered several ways of introducing above the rules clever players using…
We study voting games on binary issues, where voters hold an objective over the outcome of the collective decision and are allowed, before the vote takes place, to negotiate their voting strategy with the other participants. We analyse the…