Foundations of Interactive Democracy
Theoretical Computer Science
Final Report Abstract
Interactive Democracy (a.k.a. digital democracy) is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of approaches to make democratic processes more engaging and responsive. A common goal of these approaches is to utilize modern information technology in order to enable more interactive decision making processes. This project has studied the axiomatic and computational foundations of collective decision-making problems that are relevant for Interactive Democracy. The project has yielded substantial contributions to the field of Computational Social Choice (COMSOC) and adjacent areas, as evidenced by numerous publications in the top international conferences and journals of the field. For example, we have (1) devised and systematically analyzed an extension of the liquid democracy paradigm, which allows for more efficient collective decision making by giving participants the possibility to delegate their vote to multiple other participants; (2) proposed novel axioms capturing proportional representation, with many benefits over established axioms; (3) pioneered the development of proportional algorithms for dynamically ranking content in a representative way; and (4) analyzed realistic voting scenarios where information about the preferences of voters, or the availability of candidates, is incomplete. Our results have immediate applications in the context of modern online decision making platforms such as Polis, adhocracy+, or LiquidFeedback and live Q&A platforms such as slido. The fairness guarantees we provide further serve to ensure the representativeness and transparency of important democratic innovations such as participatory budgeting and sortition-based citizen assemblies.
Publications
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Approval-Based Committee Voting under Incomplete Information. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 36(5), 5076-5083.
Imber, Aviram; Israel, Jonas; Brill, Markus & Kimelfeld, Benny
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Individual Representation in Approval-Based Committee Voting. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 36(5), 4892-4899.
Brill, Markus; Israel, Jonas; Micha, Evi & Peters, Jannik
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Liquid Democracy with Ranked Delegations. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 36(5), 4884-4891.
Brill, Markus; Delemazure, Théo; George, Anne-Marie; Lackner, Martin & Schmidt-Kraepelin, Ulrike
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Anonymous and copy-robust delegations for liquid democracy. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS spotlight presentation), volume 36, pages 69441–69463, 2023.3
Markus Utke & Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin
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Multiwinner Voting with Possibly Unavailable Candidates. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 37(5), 5532-5539.
Brill, Markus; Dindar, Hayrullah; Israel, Jonas; Lang, Jérôme; Peters, Jannik & Schmidt-Kraepelin, Ulrike
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Proportionality in Approval-Based Participatory Budgeting. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 37(5), 5524-5531.
Brill, Markus; Forster, Stefan; Lackner, Martin; Maly, Jan & Peters, Jannik
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Robust and Verifiable Proportionality Axioms for Multiwinner Voting. Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, 301-301.
Brill, Markus & Peters, Jannik
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Approval-Based Committee Voting in Practice: A Case Study of (over-)Representation in the Polkadot Blockchain. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 38(9), 9519-9527.
Boehmer, Niclas; Brill, Markus; Cevallos, Alfonso; Gehrlein, Jonas; Sánchez-Fernández, Luis & Schmidt-Kraepelin, Ulrike
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Can a few decide for many? The metric distortion of sortition. In Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024
Ioannis Caragiannis; Evi Micha & Jannik Peters
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Dynamic proportional rankings. Social Choice and Welfare, 64(1-2), 221-261.
Israel, Jonas & Brill, Markus
