Related papers: Agreement, Diversity, and Polarization Indices for…
We consider the notions of agreement, diversity, and polarization in ordinal elections (that is, in elections where voters rank the candidates). While (computational) social choice offers good measures of agreement between the voters, such…
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…
We introduce two models of multiwinner elections with approval preferences and labelled candidates that take the committee's diversity into account. One model aims to find a committee with maximal diversity given a scoring function (e.g. of…
Among two-candidate elections that treat the candidates symmetrically and never result in a tie, which voting rules are fair? A natural requirement is that each voter exerts an equal influence over the outcome, i.e., is equally likely to…
Current alignment pipelines presume a single, universal notion of desirable behavior. However, human preferences often diverge across users, contexts, and cultures. As a result, disagreement collapses into the majority signal and minority…
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…
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…
We analyze the structure of the disagreement among a population of voters over a set of alternatives. Surveys typically ask either for pairwise comparisons, simple and intuitive for participants, or full rankings over alternatives,…
The map of elections framework is a methodology for visualizing and analyzing election datasets. So far, the framework was restricted to elections that have equal numbers of candidates, equal numbers of voters, and where all the (ordinal)…
In this paper, we experimentally compare major approval-based multiwinner voting rules. To this end, we define a measure of similarity between two equal-sized committees subject to a given election. Using synthetic elections coming from…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. The definition is flexible about the location or boundaries of the center. Using US survey data, the paper shows how this…
The polarization measure is the probability that among 3 individuals chosen at random from a finite population exactly 2 come from the same class. This index is maximum at the midpoints of the edges of the probability simplex. We compute…
To understand and summarize approval preferences and other binary evaluation data, it is useful to order the items on an axis which explains the data. In a political election using approval voting, this could be an ideological left-right…
Voting is a very general method of preference aggregation. A voting rule takes as input every voter's vote (typically, a ranking of the alternatives), and produces as output either just the winning alternative or a ranking of the…
Politics around the world exhibits increasing polarization, demonstrated in part by rigid voting configurations in institutions like legislatures or courts. A crux of polarization is separation along a unidimensional ideological axis, but…
This paper studies power indices based on average representations of a weighted game. If restricted to account for the lack of power of dummy voters, average representations become coherent measures of voting power, with power distributions…
Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…
When selecting multiple candidates based on approval preferences of agents, the proportional representation of agents' opinions is an important and well-studied desideratum. Existing criteria for evaluating the representativeness of…
We study multiwinner elections with approval-based preferences. An instance of a multiwinner election consists of a set of alternatives, a population of voters---each voter approves a subset of alternatives, and the desired committee size…
We study the multifaceted question of how to sample approval elections in a meaningful way. Our analysis aims to discern the properties of various statistical cultures (both established and new ones). Based on the map-of-elections framework…