Related papers: Selecting Interlacing Committees
The controversies around the 2020 US presidential elections certainly casts serious concerns on the efficiency of the current voting system in representing the people's will. Is the naive Plurality voting suitable in an extremely polarized…
The simplified hypothesis that an election is polarized as an explanation of recent electoral outcomes worldwide is centered on perceptions of voting patterns rather than ideological data from the electorate. While the literature focuses on…
Motivated by civic problems such as participatory budgeting and multiwinner elections, we consider the problem of public good allocation: Given a set of indivisible projects (or candidates) of different sizes, and voters with different…
We examine the following voting situation. A committee of $k$ people is to be formed from a pool of n candidates. The voters selecting the committee will submit a list of $j$ candidates that they would prefer to be on the committee. We…
Societies often rely on human experts to take a wide variety of decisions affecting their members, from jail-or-release decisions taken by judges and stop-and-frisk decisions taken by police officers to accept-or-reject decisions taken by…
Extreme polarization can undermine democracy by making compromise impossible and transforming politics into a zero-sum game. Ideological polarization - the extent to which political views are widely dispersed - is already strong among…
Submodular function optimization has numerous applications in machine learning and data analysis, including data summarization which aims to identify a concise and diverse set of data points from a large dataset. It is important to…
Norms have been extensively proposed as coordination mechanisms for both agent and human societies. Nevertheless, choosing the norms to regulate a society is by no means straightforward. The reasons are twofold. First, the norms to choose…
This paper provides a novel summary measure of ideological polarization in the American public based on the joint distribution of survey responses. Intuitively, polarization is maximized when views are concentrated at opposing extremes with…
The way that people make choices or exhibit preferences can be strongly affected by the set of available alternatives, often called the choice set. Furthermore, there are usually heterogeneous preferences, either at an individual level…
Political polarization has become a growing concern in democratic societies, as it drives tribal alignments and erodes civic deliberation among citizens. Given its prevalence across different countries, previous research has sought to…
In populations with community structure, the formation of consensus requires both alignment within and diffusion of beliefs across groups, processes that evolve on distinct time scales. How do modularity, asymmetry, and polarization shape…
Sortition is a political system in which decisions are made by panels of randomly selected citizens. The process for selecting a sortition panel is traditionally thought of as uniform sampling without replacement, which has strong fairness…
Mapping political party systems to metric policy spaces is one of the major methodological problems in political science. At present, in most political science project this task is performed by domain experts relying on purely qualitative…
We address the fundamental problem of selection under uncertainty by modeling it from the perspective of Bayesian persuasion. In our model, a decision maker with imperfect information always selects the option with the highest expected…
Public opinion polling is usually done by random sampling from the entire population, treating individual opinions as independent. In the real world, individuals' opinions are often correlated, e.g., among friends in a social network. In…
In the committee selection problem, the goal is to choose a subset of size $k$ from a set of candidates $C$ that collectively gives the best representation to a set of voters. We consider this problem in Euclidean $d$-space where each…
Emerging methods for participatory algorithm design have proposed collecting and aggregating individual stakeholder preferences to create algorithmic systems that account for those stakeholders' values. Using algorithmic student assignment…
Recommender systems play a crucial role in mediating our access to online information. We show that such algorithms induce a particular kind of stereotyping: if preferences for a set of items are anti-correlated in the general user…
Research on the causes of political polarization points towards multiple drivers of the problem, from social and psychological to economic and technological. However, political institutions stand out, because -- while capable of…