Related papers: No Midcost Democracy
We investigate the potential of deliberation to create consensus among fully-informed citizens. Our approach relies on two cognitive assumptions: i. citizens need a thinking frame (or perspective) to consider an issue; and ii. citizens…
The voting process is formalized as a multistage voting model with successive alternative elimination. A finite number of agents vote for one of the alternatives each round subject to their preferences. If the number of votes given to the…
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 this paper, I introduce a novel stability axiom for stochastic voting rules, called self-equivalence, by which a society considering whether to replace its voting rule using itself will choose not to do so. I then show that under the…
Most democratic countries use election methods to transform election results into whole numbers which usually give the number of seats in a legislative body the parties obtained. Which election method does this best can be specified by…
Condorcet's paradox is a fundamental result in social choice theory which states that there exist elections in which, no matter which candidate wins, a majority of voters prefer a different candidate. In fact, even if we can select any $k$…
This study examines the relationship between ambiguity and the ideological positioning of political parties across the political spectrum. We identify a strong non-monotonic (inverted U-shaped) relationship between party ideology and…
Metric distortion in social choice is a framework for evaluating how well voting rules minimize social cost when both voters and candidates exist in a shared metric space, with a voter's cost defined by their distance to a candidate. Voters…
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…
Economists often define the middle class based on income distribution, yet selecting which segment constitutes the `middle' is essentially arbitrary. This paper proposes a definition of the middle class based solely on the properties of…
Participatory budgeting engages the public in the process of allocating public money to different types of projects. PB designs differ in how voters are asked to express their preferences over candidate projects and how these preferences…
A voting center is in charge of collecting and aggregating voter preferences. In an iterative process, the center sends comparison queries to voters, requesting them to submit their preference between two items. Voters might discuss the…
Most social choice rules assume access to full rankings, while current alignment practice -- despite aiming for diversity -- typically treats voters as anonymous and comparisons as independent, effectively extracting only about one bit per…
A sender with private preferences would like to influence a receiver's action by providing information through a statistical test. The technology for information production is controlled by a monopolist intermediary, who offers a menu of…
Understanding citizens' values in participatory systems is crucial for citizen-centric policy-making. We envision a hybrid participatory system where participants make choices and provide motivations for those choices, and AI agents…
We construct a majority cellular automata based model to explain the power-law signatures in Indonesian general election results. The understanding of second-order phase transitions between two different conditions inspires the model. The…
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…
Transitive proxy voting (or "liquid democracy") is a novel form of collective decision making, often framed as an attractive hybrid of direct and representative democracy. Although the ideas behind liquid democracy have garnered widespread…
Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a popular voting method by which a limited budget is divided among a set of projects, based on the preferences of voters over the projects. PB is broadly categorised as divisible PB (if the projects are…
Issue salience is a major determinant in voters' decisions. Candidates and political parties campaign to shift salience to their advantage - a process termed priming. We study the dynamics, strategies and equilibria of campaign spending for…