Related papers: Misrepresentation in District-Based Elections
We study a generic framework that provides a unified view on two important classes of problems: (i) extensions of the k-median problem where clients are interested in having multiple facilities in their vicinity (e.g., due to the fact that,…
Diversity maximization problem is a well-studied problem where the goal is to find $k$ diverse items. Fair diversity maximization aims to select a diverse subset of $k$ items from a large dataset, while requiring that each group of items be…
Many democratic countries use district-based elections where there is a "seat" for each district in the governing body. In each district, the party whose candidate gets the maximum number of votes wins the corresponding seat. The result of…
We study the complexity of (approximate) winner determination under the Monroe and Chamberlin--Courant multiwinner voting rules, which determine the set of representatives by optimizing the total (dis)satisfaction of the voters with their…
In the apportionment problem, a fixed number of seats must be distributed among parties in proportion to the number of voters supporting each party. We study a generalization of this setting, in which voters can support multiple parties by…
Many democratic political parties hold primary elections, which nicely reflects their democratic nature and promote, among other things, the democratic value of inclusiveness. However, the methods currently used for holding such primary…
Participatory budgeting is one of the exciting developments in deliberative grassroots democracy. We concentrate on approval elections and propose proportional representation axioms in participatory budgeting, by generalizing relevant…
Measuring public opinion at subnational geographies is critical to many theories in political science. Multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) is a popular tool for doing so, although existing work is limited to measuring…
We develop methods to evaluate whether a political districting accurately represents the will of the people. To explore and showcase our ideas, we concentrate on the congressional districts for the U.S. House of representatives and use the…
In multiwinner approval elections with many candidates, voters may struggle to determine their preferences over the entire slate of candidates. It is therefore of interest to explore which (if any) fairness guarantees can be provided under…
To audit political district maps for partisan gerrymandering, one may determine a baseline for the expected distribution of partisan outcomes by sampling an ensemble of maps. One approach to sampling is to use redistricting policy as a…
MDPs with low-rank transitions -- that is, the transition matrix can be factored into the product of two matrices, left and right -- is a highly representative structure that enables tractable learning. The left matrix enables expressive…
We present an alternative voting system that aims at bridging the gap between proportional representative systems and majoritarian, single winner election systems. The system lets people vote for multiple parties, but then assigns each…
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…
We prove that under the Jefferson--D'Hondt method of apportionment, given certain distributional assumptions regarding mean rounding residuals, as well as absence of correlations between party vote shares, district sizes (in votes), and…
Over the last few years, researchers have put significant effort into understanding of the notion of proportional representation in committee election. In particular, recently they have proposed the notion of proportionality degree. We…
Popular centroid-based clustering methods are typically optimized for global objectives, and may fail to adequately represent large groups of datapoints. Thus, one needs proportionality notions suited for metric settings. Ideally, such…
Proportional fairness criteria inspired by democratic ideals of proportional representation have received growing attention in the clustering literature. Prior work has investigated them in two separate paradigms. Chen et al. [ICML 2019]…
In approval-based multiwinner voting, voters express approval preferences over a set of candidates, and the goal is to return a winning committee. This model captures a broad range of subset selection problems under preferences. Prior work…
A new mechanism for efficiently solving the Markov decision processes (MDPs) is proposed in this paper. We introduce the notion of reachability landscape where we use the Mean First Passage Time (MFPT) as a means to characterize the…