Deliberation and Voting in Approval-Based Multi-Winner Elections

Deliberation and Voting in Approval-Based Multi-Winner Elections

Kanav Mehra, Nanda Kishore Sreenivas, Kate Larson

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2853-2861. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/318

Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting rules, there is limited work that explicitly looks at the interplay of the deliberative process and voting. In this paper, we build a deliberation model using established models from the opinion-dynamics literature and study the effect of different deliberation mechanisms on voting outcomes achieved when using well-studied voting rules. Our results show that deliberation generally improves welfare and representation guarantees, but the results are sensitive to how the deliberation process is organized. We also show, experimentally, that simple voting rules, such as approval voting, perform as well as more sophisticated rules such as proportional approval voting or method of equal shares if deliberation is properly supported. This has ramifications on the practical use of such voting rules in citizen-focused democratic processes.
Keywords:
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Computational social choice
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Agent-based simulation and emergence