Campaign Management under Approval-Driven Voting Rules

Approval-like voting rules, such as Sincere-Strategy Preference-Based Approval voting (SP-AV), the Bucklin rule (an adaptive variant of $k$-Approval voting), and the Fallback rule (an adaptive variant of SP-AV) have many desirable properties: for example, they are easy to understand and encourage the candidates to choose electoral platforms that have a broad appeal. In this paper, we investigate both classic and parameterized computational complexity of electoral campaign management under such rules. We focus on two methods that can be used to promote a given candidate: asking voters to move this candidate upwards in their preference order or asking them to change the number of candidates they approve of. We show that finding an optimal campaign management strategy of the first type is easy for both Bucklin and Fallback. In contrast, the second method is computationally hard even if the degree to which we need to affect the votes is small. Nevertheless, we identify a large class of scenarios that admit fixed-parameter tractable algorithms.Comment: 34 pages, 1 figur

Complexity of Manipulation, Bribery, and Campaign Management in Bucklin and Fallback Voting

A central theme in computational social choice is to study the extent to which voting systems computationally resist manipulative attacks seeking to influence the outcome of elections, such as manipulation (i.e., strategic voting), control, and bribery. Bucklin and fallback voting are among the voting systems with the broadest resistance (i.e., NP-hardness) to control attacks. However, only little is known about their behavior regarding manipulation and bribery attacks. We comprehensively investigate the computational resistance of Bucklin and fallback voting for many of the common manipulation and bribery scenarios; we also complement our discussion by considering several campaign management problems for Bucklin and fallback.Comment: 28 page

Process to consider changing the New Zealand flag

Media release: First steps taken towards flag referendum Cabinet has agreed on the details of the flag referendum process and every political party represented in Parliament has been invited to take part, say Prime Minister John Key and Deputy Prime Minister Bill English. “Our flag is the most important symbol of our national identity and I believe that this is the right time for New Zealanders to consider changing the design to one that better reflects our status as a modern, independent nation,” Mr Key says. “However, as I have also said, retaining the current flag is a possible outcome of this process and the consideration of options will be done carefully, respectfully and with no presumption in favour of change.” Cabinet has agreed that Deputy Prime Minister Bill English will be the minister responsible for the flag consideration process. Letters were last week sent to each of the political party leaders in Parliament inviting them to nominate an MP to join a cross-party group of MPs which will have two key tasks, Mr English says. “The first will be nominating suitable candidates for a Flag Consideration Panel, which will be a group of respected New Zealanders who will seek submissions from the public on new flag designs and suggestions. “The second task will be to review the draft legislation which will enable the proposed two binding referendums on the flag to go ahead. The first referendum, which will be held late next year, will invite the public to choose a preferred design from a range put forward by the Flag Consideration Panel, and the second referendum, to be held in 2016, will be a run-off between the preferred design and the current flag. “We are today releasing the Cabinet paper which outlines the details and timeframe that Cabinet has agreed on,” Mr English says. “This includes the principles that will guide the consideration process, the projected timeline and costs. The total cost spread across two financial years is estimated at $25.7 million, with most of that going on the referendums themselves and on the public engagement process which is required to ensure that the public is well-informed and has the opportunity to participate.” The leaders of political parties have been asked to make their nominations by Monday, November 10. As sole MPs, ACT Leader David Seymour and United Future Leader Peter Dunne have agreed to join the cross-party group to represent their respective parties

On the Hardness of Bribery Variants in Voting with CP-Nets

We continue previous work by Mattei et al. (Mattei, N., Pini, M., Rossi, F., Venable, K.: Bribery in voting with CP-nets. Ann. of Math. and Artif. Intell. pp. 1--26 (2013)) in which they study the computational complexity of bribery schemes when voters have conditional preferences that are modeled by CP-nets. For most of the cases they considered, they could show that the bribery problem is solvable in polynomial time. Some cases remained open---we solve two of them and extend the previous results to the case that voters are weighted. Moreover, we consider negative (weighted) bribery in CP-nets, when the briber is not allowed to pay voters to vote for his preferred candidate.Comment: improved readability; identified Cheapest Subsets to be the enumeration variant of K.th Largest Subset, so we renamed it to K-Smallest Subsets and point to the literatur; some more typos fixe

Parameterized Algorithmics for Computational Social Choice: Nine Research Challenges

Computational Social Choice is an interdisciplinary research area involving Economics, Political Science, and Social Science on the one side, and Mathematics and Computer Science (including Artificial Intelligence and Multiagent Systems) on the other side. Typical computational problems studied in this field include the vulnerability of voting procedures against attacks, or preference aggregation in multi-agent systems. Parameterized Algorithmics is a subfield of Theoretical Computer Science seeking to exploit meaningful problem-specific parameters in order to identify tractable special cases of in general computationally hard problems. In this paper, we propose nine of our favorite research challenges concerning the parameterized complexity of problems appearing in this context

Rational Democracy:A Political System for Universal Interest

In this paper, we formulate a political system that can satisfy certain desirable characteristics that include democratic participation, serving for universal interest, public sector efficiency, and sustainable by incentive compatibility and virtuous cycles. The system comprises a set of rules and organizations that provide motivations and supports to the participants for enhancing universal interest. It is a political structure that serves the people, rules by rationality, strives for efficiency and is sustainable. They will drive the society toward harmony and rapid growth in the quality of life for all.Political System Design, Economic Development

Leadership Selection in the Major Multilaterals

Leadership selection in the major global economic organizations produced unprecedented levels of public conflict during the 1990s. The convention that awards the IMF managing directorship to a European and the World Bank presidency to an American sparked conflict between the United States and Europe as well as growing discontent on the part of Japan and the developing countries. At the WTO, successive conflicts demonstrate deeper shortcomings in governance as membership expands rapidly and consensus decision making fails. Protracted efforts to choose new heads of these increasingly important organizations have undermined their legitimacy and distracted members from their core agendas. This selection process and its flaws provide a central theme for the analysis and prescriptions presented in this study, which focuses on the major international financial institutions (IFIs) and other global and regional multilaterals. Author Miles Kahler looks at the sources of conflict and presents recommendations for reform: in the short run, changes in the process, such as the use of search committees; in the long run, the dismantling of the US-European convention at the IFIs and changes in representation at the WTO. The author's diagnosis and policy recommendations have important implications for leadership selection in other regional and global organizations.