Designing Digital Voting Systems for Citizens: Achieving Fairness and Legitimacy in Participatory Budgeting

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2310.03501v2
• Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2024 10:48:26 GMT
• Title: Designing Digital Voting Systems for Citizens: Achieving Fairness and Legitimacy in Participatory Budgeting
• Authors: Joshua C. Yang, Carina I. Hausladen, Dominik Peters, Evangelos Pournaras, Regula Hänggli Fricker, Dirk Helbing,
• Abstract summary: Participatory Budgeting (PB) has evolved into a key democratic instrument for resource allocation in cities. This work presents the results of behavioural experiments where participants were asked to vote in a fictional PB setting. We identify approaches to designing PB voting that minimise cognitive load and enhance the perceived fairness and legitimacy of the digital process.
• Score: 10.977733942901535
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Participatory Budgeting (PB) has evolved into a key democratic instrument for resource allocation in cities. Enabled by digital platforms, cities now have the opportunity to let citizens directly propose and vote on urban projects, using different voting input and aggregation rules. However, the choices cities make in terms of the rules of their PB have often not been informed by academic studies on voter behaviour and preferences. Therefore, this work presents the results of behavioural experiments where participants were asked to vote in a fictional PB setting. We identified approaches to designing PB voting that minimise cognitive load and enhance the perceived fairness and legitimacy of the digital process from the citizens' perspective. In our study, participants preferred voting input formats that are more expressive (like rankings and distributing points) over simpler formats (like approval voting). Participants also indicated a desire for the budget to be fairly distributed across city districts and project categories. Participants found the Method of Equal Shares voting rule to be fairer than the conventional Greedy voting rule. These findings offer actionable insights for digital governance, contributing to the development of fairer and more transparent digital systems and collective decision-making processes for citizens.

Related papers

• Representation Bias in Political Sample Simulations with Large Language Models [54.48283690603358]
  This study seeks to identify and quantify biases in simulating political samples with Large Language Models. Using the GPT-3.5-Turbo model, we leverage data from the American National Election Studies, German Longitudinal Election Study, Zuobiao dataset, and China Family Panel Studies.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-16T05:52:26Z)
• Efficient Weighting Schemes for Auditing Instant-Runoff Voting Elections [57.67176250198289]
  AWAIRE involves adaptively weighted averages of test statistics, essentially "learning" an effective set of hypotheses to test. We explore schemes and settings more extensively, to identify and recommend efficient choices for practice. A limitation of the current AWAIRE implementation is its restriction to a small number of candidates.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-18T10:13:01Z)
• Rank, Pack, or Approve: Voting Methods in Participatory Budgeting [2.326556516716391]
  The Stanford Participatory Budgeting platform has been used to engage residents in more than 150 budgeting processes. We present a data set with anonymized budget opinions from these processes with K-approval, K-ranking or knapsack primary ballots. We use vote pairs with different voting methods to analyze the effect of voting methods on the cost of selected projects.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-23T01:19:44Z)
• Fair and Inclusive Participatory Budgeting: Voter Experience with Cumulative and Quadratic Voting Interfaces [1.4730691320093603]
  Cumulative and quadratic voting are expressive, promoting fairness and inclusion. Despite these benefits, graphical voter interfaces for cumulative and quadratic voting are complex to implement and use effectively. This paper introduces an implementation and evaluation of cumulative and quadratic voting within a state-of-the-art voting platform: Stanford Participatory Budgeting.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-08-08T15:45:55Z)
• Adaptively Weighted Audits of Instant-Runoff Voting Elections: AWAIRE [61.872917066847855]
  Methods for auditing instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections are either not risk-limiting or require cast vote records (CVRs), the voting system's electronic record of the votes on each ballot. We develop an RLA method that uses adaptively weighted averages of test supermartingales to efficiently audit IRV elections when CVRs are not available.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-07-20T15:55:34Z)
• VoteLab: A Modular and Adaptive Experimentation Platform for Online Collective Decision Making [2.8225382405626394]
  This paper introduces VoteLab, an open-source platform for modular and adaptive design of voting experiments. It supports to visually and interactively build reusable campaigns with a choice of different voting methods. Voters can easily respond to subscribed voting questions on a smartphone.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-07-20T14:26:21Z)
• Diverse Representation via Computational Participatory Elections -- Lessons from a Case Study [16.699381591572166]
  We have designed a novel participatory electoral process coined the Representation Pact, implemented with the support of a computational system. That process explicitly enables voters to decide on representation criteria in a first round, and then lets them vote for candidates in a second round. After the two rounds, a counting method is applied, which selects the committee of candidates that maximizes the number of votes received in the second round.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-05-30T19:22:38Z)
• Obvious Manipulability of Voting Rules [105.35249497503527]
  The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem states that no unanimous and non-dictatorial voting rule is strategyproof. We revisit voting rules and consider a weaker notion of strategyproofness called not obvious manipulability.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-11-03T02:41:48Z)
• Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur: Visual Communication of Uncertainty in Election Polls [56.8172499765118]
  We discuss potential sources of bias in nowcasting and forecasting. Concepts are presented to attenuate the issue of falsely perceived accuracy. One key idea is the use of Probabilities of Events instead of party shares.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-04-28T07:02:24Z)
• Bribery as a Measure of Candidate Success: Complexity Results for Approval-Based Multiwinner Rules [58.8640284079665]
  We study the problem of bribery in multiwinner elections, for the case where the voters cast approval ballots (i.e., sets of candidates they approve) We consider a number of approval-based multiwinner rules (AV, SAV, GAV, RAV, approval-based Chamberlin--Courant, and PAV) In general, our problems tend to be easier when we limit out bribery actions on increasing the number of approvals of the candidate that we want to be in a winning committee.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-04-19T08:26:40Z)
• Knapsack Voting for Participatory Budgeting [4.853751680856816]
  We introduce a novel scheme tailored to participatory budgeting called "Knapsack Voting" We show that it is strategy-proof under a natural model of utility. We extend Knapsack Voting to more general settings with revenues, deficits or surpluses, and prove a similar strategy-proofness result.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-09-15T03:58:03Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.