Rank, Pack, or Approve: Voting Methods in Participatory Budgeting

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12423v4
• Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2024 16:47:33 GMT
• Title: Rank, Pack, or Approve: Voting Methods in Participatory Budgeting
• Authors: Lodewijk Gelauff, Ashish Goel,
• Abstract summary: 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.
• Score: 2.326556516716391
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Participatory budgeting is a popular method to engage residents in budgeting decisions by local governments. The Stanford Participatory Budgeting platform is an online platform that 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. For a subset of the voters, it includes paired votes with a different elicitation method in the same process. This presents a unique data set, as the voters, projects and setting are all related to real-world decisions that the voters have an actual interest in. With data from primary ballots we find that while ballot complexity (number of projects to choose from, number of projects to select and ballot length) is correlated with a higher median time spent by voters, it is not correlated with a higher abandonment rate. We use vote pairs with different voting methods to analyze the effect of voting methods on the cost of selected projects, more comprehensively than was previously possible. In most elections, voters selected significantly more expensive projects using K-approval than using knapsack, although we also find a small number of examples with a significant effect in the opposite direction. This effect happens at the aggregate level as well as for individual voters, and is influenced both by the implicit constraints of the voting method and the explicit constraints of the voting interface. Finally, we validate the use of K-ranking elicitation to offer a paper alternative for knapsack voting.

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)
• Employing Universal Voting Schemes for Improved Visual Place Recognition Performance [16.242139178368923]
  This paper analyses several voting schemes to maximise the place detection accuracy of a VPR ensemble set up. We take inspiration from a variety of voting schemes that are widely employed in fields such as politics and sociology.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-03-08T14:19:14Z)
• 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)
• Learning to Manipulate under Limited Information [44.99833362998488]
  We trained over 70,000 neural networks of 26 sizes to manipulate against 8 different voting methods. We find that some voting methods, such as Borda, are highly manipulable by networks with limited information, while others, such as Instant Runoff, are not.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-29T18:49:50Z)
• Designing Digital Voting Systems for Citizens: Achieving Fairness and Legitimacy in Participatory Budgeting [10.977733942901535]
  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.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-10-05T12:25:48Z)
• 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)
• Candidate Incentive Distributions: How voting methods shape electoral incentives [0.0]
  We find that Instant Runoff Voting incentivizes candidates to appeal to a wider range of voters than Plurality Voting. We find that Condorcet methods and STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) Voting provide the most balanced incentives.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-06-12T14:32:46Z)
• Private Multi-Winner Voting for Machine Learning [48.0093793427039]
  We propose three new DP multi-winner mechanisms: Binary, $tau$, and Powerset voting. Binary voting operates independently per label through composition. $tau$ voting bounds votes optimally in their $ell$ norm for tight data-independent guarantees. Powerset voting operates over the entire binary vector by viewing the possible outcomes as a power set.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-11-23T20:06:46Z)
• 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.