2,401 research outputs found
Exploiting Social Influence to Control Elections Based on Scoring Rules
Online social networks are used to diffuse opinions and ideas among users,
enabling a faster communication and a wider audience. The way in which opinions
are conditioned by social interactions is usually called social influence.
Social influence is extensively used during political campaigns to advertise
and support candidates. Herein we consider the problem of exploiting social
influence in a network of voters in order to change their opinion about a
target candidate with the aim of increasing his chance to win/lose the election
in a wide range of voting systems.
We introduce the Linear Threshold Ranking, a natural and powerful extension
of the well-established Linear Threshold Model, which describes the change of
opinions taking into account the amount of exercised influence. We are able to
maximize the score of a target candidate up to a factor of by showing
submodularity. We exploit such property to provide a
-approximation algorithm for the constructive election
control problem. Similarly, we get a -approximation ratio
in the destructive scenario. The algorithm can be used in arbitrary scoring
rule voting systems, including plurality rule and borda count. Finally, we
perform an experimental study on real-world networks, measuring Probability of
Victory (PoV) and Margin of Victory (MoV) of the target candidate, to validate
the model and to test the capability of the algorithm.Comment: Extended abstract published in Proceedings of the 18th International
Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS 2019). Paper
published in Proceedings of the 28th International Joint Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2019
Multi-Winner Election Control via Social Influence
In an election, we are given a set of voters, each having a preference list
over a set of candidates, that are distributed on a social network. We consider
a scenario where voters may change their preference lists as a consequence of
the messages received by their neighbors in a social network. Specifically, we
consider a political campaign that spreads messages in a social network in
support or against a given candidate and the spreading follows a dynamic model
for information diffusion. When a message reaches a voter, this latter changes
its preference list according to an update rule. The election control problem
asks to find a bounded set of nodes to be the starter of a political campaign
in support (constructive problem) or against (destructive problem) a given
target candidate , in such a way that the margin of victory of w.r.t.
its most voted opponents is maximized. It has been shown that several variants
of the problem can be solved within a constant factor approximation of the
optimum, which shows that controlling elections by means of social networks is
doable and constitutes a real problem for modern democracies. Most of the
literature, however, focuses on the case of single-winner elections. In this
paper, we define the election control problem in social networks for
"multi-winner elections" with the aim of modeling parliamentarian elections.
Differently from the single-winner case, we show that the multi-winner election
control problem is NP-hard to approximate within any factor in both
constructive and destructive cases. We then study a relaxation of the problem
where votes are aggregated on the basis of parties (instead of single
candidates), which is a variation of the so-called "straight-party voting" used
in some real parliamentarian elections. We show that the latter problem remains
NP-hard but can be approximated within a constant factor
Fear Not, Vote Truthfully: Secure Multiparty Computation of Score Based Rules
We propose a secure voting protocol for score-based voting rules, where
independent talliers perform the tallying procedure. The protocol outputs the
winning candidate(s) while preserving the privacy of the voters and the secrecy
of the ballots. It offers perfect secrecy, in the sense that apart from the
desired output, all other information -- the ballots, intermediate values, and
the final scores received by each of the candidates -- is not disclosed to any
party, including the talliers. Such perfect secrecy may increase the voters'
confidence and, consequently, encourage them to vote according to their true
preferences. The protocol is extremely lightweight, and therefore it can be
easily deployed in real-life voting scenarios
Prices Matter for the Parameterized Complexity of Shift Bribery
In the Shift Bribery problem, we are given an election (based on preference
orders), a preferred candidate , and a budget. The goal is to ensure that
wins by shifting higher in some voters' preference orders. However,
each such shift request comes at a price (depending on the voter and on the
extent of the shift) and we must not exceed the given budget. We study the
parameterized computational complexity of Shift Bribery with respect to a
number of parameters (pertaining to the nature of the solution sought and the
size of the election) and several classes of price functions. When we
parameterize Shift Bribery by the number of affected voters, then for each of
our voting rules (Borda, Maximin, Copeland) the problem is W[2]-hard. If,
instead, we parameterize by the number of positions by which is shifted in
total,then the problem is fixed-parameter tractable for Borda and Maximin,and
is W[1]-hard for Copeland. If we parameterize by the budget, then the results
depend on the price function class. We also show that Shift Bribery tends to be
tractable when parameterized by the number of voters, but that the results for
the number of candidates are more enigmatic
Corruption in UK local government: the mounting risks
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Organized Business, Political Regimes and Property Rights across the Russian Federation
This article explores the inter-relationship of collective action within the business community, the nature of the political regime and the security of firmsâ property rights. Drawing on a pair of surveys recently administered in Russia, we present evidence that post-communist business associations have begun to coordinate business influence over state actors in a manner that is sensitive to regional politics. A firmâs ability to defend itself from government predation and to shape its institutional environment as well as its propensity to invest in physical capital are strongly related to both its membership in a business association and the level of democratization in its region. Of particular note, the positive effect of association membership on securing property rights increases in less democratic regions. The evidence, that is, suggests that collective action in the business community substitutes for democratic pressure in constraining public officials.
Do Elections Affect the Composition of Fiscal Policy?
This paper investigates the impact of elections on the level and composition of fiscal instruments using a sample of 19 high-income OECD countries that can be characterized as developed, established democracies during the period 1972-1999. We find that elections shift public spending towards current and away from capital expenditures. Moreover, although we find no evidence for an electoral cycle for government deficit and expenditures, we do find a negative effect of elections on revenue. Our results indicate that the fall in revenue in election periods is attributed to a fall in direct taxation. The decomposition of our electoral dummy suggests that fiscal manipulation seems to be concentrated shortly before the elections. Finally, when we distinguish among predetermined and endogenous elections we find that the above results apply only for the predetermined electoral periods while endogenous elections seem to increase the budget deficit and to leave the composition of fiscal policy unaffected.political budget cycles, elections, composition of fiscal policy, quality of public expenditure
Complexity Dichotomies for Unweighted Scoring Rules
Scoring systems are an extremely important class of election systems. We
study the complexity of manipulation, constructive control by deleting voters
(CCDV), and bribery for scoring systems.
For manipulation, we show that for all scoring rules with a constant number
of different coefficients, manipulation is in P. And we conjecture that there
is no dichotomy theorem.
On the other hand, we obtain dichotomy theorems for CCDV and bribery problem.
More precisely, we show that both of these problems are easy for 1-approval,
2-approval, 1-veto, 2-veto, 3-veto, generalized 2-veto, and (2,1,...,1,0), and
hard in all other cases. These results are the "dual" of the dichotomy theorem
for the constructive control by adding voters (CCAV) problem from
(Hemaspaandra, Hemaspaandra, Schnoor, AAAI 2014), but do not at all follow from
that result. In particular, proving hardness for CCDV is harder than for CCAV
since we do not have control over what the controller can delete, and proving
easiness for bribery tends to be harder than for control, since bribery can be
viewed as control followed by manipulation
Deliberative Democracy in the EU. Countering Populism with Participation and Debate. CEPS Paperback
Elections are the preferred way to freely transfer power from one
term to the next and from one political party or coalition to another.
They are an essential element of democracy. But if the process of
power transfer is corrupted, democracy risks collapse. Reliance on
voters, civil society organisations and neutral observers to fully
exercise their freedoms as laid down in international human rights
conventions is an integral part of holding democratic elections.
Without free, fair and regular elections, liberal democracy is
inconceivable.
Elections are no guarantee that democracy will take root and
hold, however. If the history of political participation in Europe over
the past 800 years is anything to go by, successful attempts at gaining
voice have been patchy, while leadersâ attempts to silence these
voices and consolidate their own power have been almost constant
(Blockmans, 2020).
Recent developments in certain EU member states have again
shown us that democratically elected leaders will try and use
majoritarian rule to curb freedoms, overstep the constitutional limits
of their powers, protect the interests of their cronies and recycle
themselves through seemingly free and fair elections. In their recent
book How Democracies Die, two Harvard professors of politics write:
âSince the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have
been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments
themselvesâ (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018)
Election Manipulation on Social Networks: Seeding, Edge Removal, Edge Addition
We focus on the election manipulation problem through social influence, where
a manipulator exploits a social network to make her most preferred candidate
win an election. Influence is due to information in favor of and/or against one
or multiple candidates, sent by seeds and spreading through the network
according to the independent cascade model. We provide a comprehensive study of
the election control problem, investigating two forms of manipulations: seeding
to buy influencers given a social network, and removing or adding edges in the
social network given the seeds and the information sent. In particular, we
study a wide range of cases distinguishing for the number of candidates or the
kind of information spread over the network. Our main result is positive for
democracy, and it shows that the election manipulation problem is not
affordable in the worst-case except for trivial classes of instances, even when
one accepts to approximate the margin of victory. In the case of seeding, we
also show that the manipulation is hard even if the graph is a line and that a
large class of algorithms, including most of the approaches recently adopted
for social-influence problems, fail to compute a bounded approximation even on
elementary networks, as undirected graphs with every node having a degree at
most two or directed trees. In the case of edge removal or addition, our
hardness results also apply to the basic case of social influence
maximization/minimization. In contrast, the hardness of election manipulation
holds even when the manipulator has an unlimited budget, being allowed to
remove or add an arbitrary number of edges.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1902.0377
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