Related papers: Distributive Politics, Representation, and Redistr…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
We study the problem of a partisan gerrymanderer who assigns voters to equipopulous districts so as to maximize his party's expected seat share. The designer faces both aggregate uncertainty (how many votes his party will receive) and…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
We consider a setting with agents that have preferences over alternatives and are partitioned into disjoint districts. The goal is to choose one alternative as the winner using a mechanism which first decides a representative alternative…
We investigate the distribution of partisanship in a cross-section of ten diverse States to elucidate how votes translate into seats won and other metrics. Markov chain simulations taking into account partisanship distribution agree…
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…
We study the effects of campaigning, where the society is partitioned into voter clusters and a diffusion process propagates opinions in a network connecting the clusters. Our model is very powerful and can incorporate many campaigning…
Our model describes competition between groups driven by the choices of self-interested voters within groups. Within a Poisson voting environment, parties observe aggregate support from groups and can allocate prizes or punishments to them.…
In an election, we are given a set of voters, each having a preference list over a set of candidates, that are distributed on a social network. We consider a scenario where voters may change their preference lists as a consequence of the…
The outcome of elections is strongly dependent on the districting choices, making thus possible (and frequent) the gerrymandering phenomenon, i.e.\ politicians suitably changing the shape of electoral districts in order to win the…
Every representative democracy must specify a mechanism under which voters choose their representatives. The most common mechanism in the United States -- Winner takes all single-member districts -- both enables substantial partisan…
Gerrymandering, the deliberate manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is a persistent issue in U.S. redistricting cycles. This paper introduces and analyzes a new phenomenon, 'votemandering'- a strategic…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
The form of political polarization where citizens develop strongly negative attitudes towards out-party policies and members has become increasingly prominent across many democracies. Economic hardship and social inequality, as well as…
Distribution shifts have long been regarded as troublesome external forces that a decision-maker should either counteract or conform to. An intriguing feedback phenomenon termed decision dependence arises when the deployed decision affects…
The Hotelling-Downs model considers parties changing policy to maximise their vote-share. Where policy position lies on a left-right axis, it describes a tendency for political parties to move towards centrist platforms. This is in contrast…
We consider distributed elections, where there is a center and $k$ sites. In such distributed elections, each voter has preferences over some set of candidates, and each voter is assigned to exactly one site such that each site is aware…
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 focus on the scenario in which an agent can exploit his information advantage to manipulate the outcome of an election. In particular, we study district-based elections with two candidates, in which the winner of the election is the…
The dynamics of dispersal-structured populations, consisting of competing individuals that are characterized by different diffusion coefficients but are otherwise identical, is investigated. Competition is taken into account through…