Related papers: Upgrading Democracies with Fairer Voting Methods
Recent years have seen an increase in the use of online deliberation platforms (DPs). One of the main objectives of DPs is to enhance democratic participation, by allowing citizens to post, comment, and vote on policy proposals. But in what…
Using data from 35 Participatory Budgeting instances in Amsterdam, we empirically compare two different Participatory Budgeting rules: the greedy cost welfare rule and the Method of Equal Shares. We quantify how proportional, equal and fair…
Online data has the potential to transform how researchers and companies produce election forecasts. Social media surveys, online panels and even comments scraped from the internet can offer valuable insights into political preferences.…
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…
We study the problem of {\em impartial selection}, a topic that lies at the intersection of computational social choice and mechanism design. The goal is to select the most popular individual among a set of community members. The input can…
In democracies, major policy decisions typically require some form of majority or consensus, so elites must secure mass support to govern. Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass…
Conventional automated decision-support systems often prioritize predictive accuracy, overlooking the complexities of real-world settings where stakeholders' preferences may diverge or conflict. This can lead to outcomes that disadvantage…
Liquid democracy allows members of an electorate to either directly vote over alternatives, or delegate their voting rights to someone they trust. Most of the liquid democracy literature and implementations allow each voter to nominate only…
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,…
A method is given for quantitatively rating the social acceptance of different options which are the matter of a preferential vote. In contrast to a previous article, here the individual votes are allowed to be incomplete, that is, they…
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…
We examine an approval-based model of Liquid Democracy with a budget constraint on voting and delegating costs, aiming to centrally select casting voters ensuring complete representation of the electorate. From a computational complexity…
The wisdom of the crowd has long become the de facto approach for eliciting information from individuals or experts in order to predict the ground truth. However, classical democratic approaches for aggregating individual \emph{votes} only…
Online discussion platforms are a vital part of the public discourse in a deliberative democracy. However, how to interpret the outcomes of the discussions on these platforms is often unclear. In this paper, we propose a novel and…
We study the problem of fair sequential decision making given voter preferences. In each round, a decision rule must choose a decision from a set of alternatives where each voter reports which of these alternatives they approve. Instead of…
We consider a model where a subset of candidates must be selected based on voter preferences, subject to general constraints that specify which subsets are feasible. This model generalizes committee elections with diversity constraints,…
Approval voting is a common method of preference aggregation where voters vote by ``approving'' of a subset of candidates and the winner(s) are those who are approved of by the largest number of voters. In approval voting, the degree to…
Many democratic societies use district-based elections, where the region under consideration is geographically divided into districts and a representative is chosen for each district based on the preferences of the electors who reside…
In the context of computational social choice, we study voting methods that assign a set of winners to each profile of voter preferences. A voting method satisfies the property of positive involvement (PI) if for any election in which a…
How to elect the representatives in legislative bodies is a question that every modern democracy has to answer. This design task has to consider various elements so as to fulfill the citizens' expectations and contribute to the maintenance…