Understanding Political Agreements and Disagreements: Evidence from the 2022 French Presidential Election

Since the seminal works of Condorcet and Borda, social choice theory has explored how to aggregate individual preferences into collective decisions. Yet, social choice theory has focused primarily on identifying winners in elections involving few candidates, leaving questions about direct participation on multiple issues relatively unexplored. Here we analyze data collected in a direct participation experiment where people built their own government programs using 120 proposals from the candidates of the 2022 French presidential. We find that in this setting it is useful to introduce a measure of "divisiveness," which can be constructed for any voting rule, is orthogonal to them, and helps identify polarizing proposals. We show that divisiveness captures fragmentation across multiple dimensions (sex, age, political orientation, and urban-rural divide) and explore some of its axiomatic properties. These results suggest divisiveness is a relevant aggregate in direct forms of participation.Comment: 23 pages main manuscript with 8 figures. 25 pages of supplementary materia

Interactive discovery system for direct democracy

Decide Madrid is the civic technology of Madrid City Council which allows users to create and support online petitions. Despite the initial success, the platform is encountering problems with the growth of petition signing because petitions are far from the minimum number of supporting votes they must gather. Previous analyses have suggested that this problem is produced by the interface: a paginated list of petitions which applies a non-optimal ranking algorithm. For this reason, we present an interactive system for the discovery of topics and petitions. This approach leads us to reflect on the usefulness of data visualization techniques to address relevant societal challenges.This work is supported by Medialab Prado and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the María de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015-0502). We would like to thank the team at Participa LAB for their valuable feedback which served to improve this system

Interactive discovery system for direct democracy

Decide Madrid is the civic technology of Madrid City Council which allows users to create and support online petitions. Despite the initial success, the platform is encountering problems with the growth of petition signing because petitions are far from the minimum number of supporting votes they must gather. Previous analyses have suggested that this problem is produced by the interface: a paginated list of petitions which applies a non-optimal ranking algorithm. For this reason, we present an interactive system for the discovery of topics and petitions. This approach leads us to reflect on the usefulness of data visualization techniques to address relevant societal challenges.This work is supported by Medialab Prado and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the María de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015-0502). We would like to thank the team at Participa LAB for their valuable feedback which served to improve this system