The Open Parliament in the Age of the Internet
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Direct E-Democracy and Political Party Websites: in the United States and Sweden
Rochester Institute of Technology RIT Scholar Works Theses 5-1-2015 Direct E-Democracy and Political Party Websites: In the United States and Sweden Kirk M. Winans Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.rit.edu/theses Recommended Citation Winans, Kirk M., "Direct E-Democracy and Political Party Websites: In the United States and Sweden" (2015). Thesis. Rochester Institute of Technology. Accessed from This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by RIT Scholar Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses by an authorized administrator of RIT Scholar Works. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Running head: E-DEMOCRACY AND POLITICAL PARTY WEBSITES Direct E-Democracy and Political Party Websites: In the United States and Sweden by Kirk M. Winans Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Graduation Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science Science, Technology and Public Policy Department of Public Policy College of Liberal Arts Rochester Institute of Technology May 1, 2015 E-DEMOCRACY AND POLITICAL PARTY WEBSITES Direct E-Democracy and Political Party Websites: In the United States and Sweden A thesis submitted to The Public Policy Department at Rochester Institute of Technology By Kirk M. Winans Under the faculty guidance of Franz Foltz, Ph.D. Submitted by: Kirk M. Winans Signature Date Accepted by: Dr. Franz Foltz Thesis Advisor, Graduate Coordinator Signature Date Associate Professor, Dept. of STS/Public Policy Rochester Institute of Technology Dr. Rudy Pugliese Committee Member Signature Date Professor, School of Communication Rochester Institute of Technology Dr. Ryan Garcia Committee Member Signature Date Assistant Professor, Dept. -
State of Populism in Europe
2018 State of Populism in Europe The past few years have seen a surge in the public support of populist, Eurosceptical and radical parties throughout almost the entire European Union. In several countries, their popularity matches or even exceeds the level of public support of the centre-left. Even though the centre-left parties, think tanks and researchers are aware of this challenge, there is still more OF POPULISM IN EUROPE – 2018 STATE that could be done in this fi eld. There is occasional research on individual populist parties in some countries, but there is no regular overview – updated every year – how the popularity of populist parties changes in the EU Member States, where new parties appear and old ones disappear. That is the reason why FEPS and Policy Solutions have launched this series of yearbooks, entitled “State of Populism in Europe”. *** FEPS is the fi rst progressive political foundation established at the European level. Created in 2007 and co-fi nanced by the European Parliament, it aims at establishing an intellectual crossroad between social democracy and the European project. Policy Solutions is a progressive political research institute based in Budapest. Among the pre-eminent areas of its research are the investigation of how the quality of democracy evolves, the analysis of factors driving populism, and election research. Contributors : Tamás BOROS, Maria FREITAS, Gergely LAKI, Ernst STETTER STATE OF POPULISM Tamás BOROS IN EUROPE Maria FREITAS • This book is edited by FEPS with the fi nancial support of the European -
Arxiv:2105.05142V1 [Cs.GT] 11 May 2021 Less Comfortable With
Pirates in Wonderland: Liquid Democracy has Bicriteria Guarantees Jonathan A. Noel1, Mashbat Suzuki2, and Adrian Vetta2 1 University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada [email protected] 2 McGill University, Montreal, Canada [email protected], [email protected] Abstract. Liquid democracy has a natural graphical representation, the delegation graph. Consequently, the strategic aspects of liquid democracy can be studied as a game over delegation graphs, called the liquid democ- racy game. Our main result is that this game has bicriteria approximation guarantees, in terms of both rationality and social welfare. Specifically, we prove the price of stability for -Nash equilibria is exactly in the liquid democracy game. 1 Introduction Liquid democracy is a form of direct and representative democracy, based on the concept of delegation. Each voter has the choice of voting themselves or transferring (transitively) its vote to a trusted proxy. Recent interest in liquid democracy, from both practical and theoretical perspectives, was sparked by the Pirate Party in Germany and its Liquid Feedback platform [2]. Similar initiatives have subsequently been undertaken by the Demoex Party in Sweden, the Internet Party in Spain, and the Net Party in Argentina. There are many potential benefits of a transitive delegation mechanism. Par- ticipation may improve in quantity for several reasons. The system is easy to use and understand, induces low barriers to participation, and is inherently egalitar- ian: there is no distinction between voters and representatives; every one is both a voter and a delegator. Participation may also improve in quality due to the flexibility to choose different forms of participation: voters can chose to be active participants on topics they are comfortable with or delegate on topics they are arXiv:2105.05142v1 [cs.GT] 11 May 2021 less comfortable with. -
International Social Research and Behavioral Sciences Symposium April 20-21, 2019 / Sarajevo
SADAB 3rd International Social Research and Behavioral Sciences Symposium April 20-21, 2019 / Sarajevo Proceeding Book ISBN 978-605-65197-1-0 Sarajevo-2019 SADAB 3rd International Social Research and Behavioral Sciences Symposium April 20-21, 2019 /Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina İçindekiler Chair of Symposium ............................................................................................................................ 3 Organisation Committee ...................................................................................................................... 3 Scientific Committee ........................................................................................................................... 4 The Mediator Effect of Leader- Member Exchange on The Relationship between Organizational Cynicism and Organizational Climate ................................................................................................. 7 Challenges Facing The European Union and The European Integration Process Due to The Refugee Crisis and Brexit ................................................................................................................................ 17 The Psycholinguistic Approach to The Nayional Self- Consciousnes .............................................. 27 Serahsî’de Sahâbe Uygulamaları Bağlamında Maslahat Düşüncesi ................................................. 34 Түркия және Өзбекстан қазақтарындағы балаға байланысты әдет-ғұрыптарындағы ерекшеліктер ................................................................................................................................... -
Computational Perspectives on Democracy
Computational Perspectives on Democracy Anson Kahng CMU-CS-21-126 August 2021 Computer Science Department School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Thesis Committee: Ariel Procaccia (Chair) Chinmay Kulkarni Nihar Shah Vincent Conitzer (Duke University) David Pennock (Rutgers University) Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Copyright c 2021 Anson Kahng This research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation under grant numbers IIS-1350598, CCF- 1525932, and IIS-1714140, the Department of Defense under grant number W911NF1320045, the Office of Naval Research under grant number N000141712428, and the JP Morgan Research grant. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of any sponsoring institution, the U.S. government or any other entity. Keywords: Computational Social Choice, Theoretical Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence For Grandpa and Harabeoji. iv Abstract Democracy is a natural approach to large-scale decision-making that allows people affected by a potential decision to provide input about the outcome. However, modern implementations of democracy are based on outdated infor- mation technology and must adapt to the changing technological landscape. This thesis explores the relationship between computer science and democracy, which is, crucially, a two-way street—just as principles from computer science can be used to analyze and design democratic paradigms, ideas from democracy can be used to solve hard problems in computer science. Question 1: What can computer science do for democracy? To explore this first question, we examine the theoretical foundations of three democratic paradigms: liquid democracy, participatory budgeting, and multiwinner elections. -
Liquid Democracy: an Algorithmic Perspective
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 70 (2021) 1223-1252 Submitted 11/2020; published 03/2021 Liquid Democracy: An Algorithmic Perspective Anson Kahng [email protected] Computer Science Department Carnegie Mellon University Simon Mackenzie [email protected] University of New South Wales Ariel D. Procaccia [email protected] School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Harvard University Abstract We study liquid democracy, a collective decision making paradigm that allows voters to transitively delegate their votes, through an algorithmic lens. In our model, there are two alternatives, one correct and one incorrect, and we are interested in the probability that the majority opinion is correct. Our main question is whether there exist delegation mechanisms that are guaranteed to outperform direct voting, in the sense of being always at least as likely, and sometimes more likely, to make a correct decision. Even though we assume that voters can only delegate their votes to better-informed voters, we show that local delegation mechanisms, which only take the local neighborhood of each voter as input (and, arguably, capture the spirit of liquid democracy), cannot provide the foregoing guarantee. By contrast, we design a non-local delegation mechanism that does provably outperform direct voting under mild assumptions about voters. 1. Introduction Liquid democracy is a modern approach to voting in which voters can either vote directly or delegate their vote to other voters. In contrast to the classic proxy voting paradigm (Miller, 1969), the key innovation underlying liquid democracy is that proxies | who were selected by voters to vote on their behalf | may delegate their own vote to a proxy, and, in doing so, further delegate all the votes entrusted to them. -
Incentivising Participation in Liquid Democracy with Breadth-First Delegation∗
Research Paper AAMAS 2020, May 9–13, Auckland, New Zealand Incentivising Participation in Liquid Democracy with Breadth-First Delegation∗ Grammateia Kotsialou Luke Riley Political Economy - King’s College London Informatics - King’s College London, Quant Network London, United Kingdom London, United Kingdom [email protected] luke.riley@{kcl.ac.uk,quant.network} ABSTRACT Party in Argentina and Partido de Internet in Spain have been ex- Liquid democracy allows members of an electorate to either directly perimenting with liquid democracy implementations. Additionally, vote over alternatives, or delegate their voting rights to someone the local governments of the London Southwark borough and the they trust. Most of the liquid democracy literature and implementa- Italian cities Turino and San Dona di Piave are working on integrat- tions allow each voter to nominate only one delegate per election. ing liquid democracy for community engagement processes (Boella However, if that delegate abstains, the voting rights assigned to et al. [2018]). In the technology domain, the online platform Liq- her are left unused. To minimise the number of unused delegations, uidFeedback uses a liquid democracy system where a user selects it has been suggested that each voter should declare a personal a single guru for different topics (Behrens et al. [2014]; Kling etal. ranking over voters she trusts. In this paper, we show that even if [2015]). Another prominent online example is GoogleVotes (Hardt personal rankings over voters are declared, the standard delegation and Lopes [2015]), where each user wishing to delegate can select method of liquid democracy remains problematic. More specifically, a ranking over other voters. -
Icts and Democratic Processes
Democratic Processes and ICTs Summer 2011, [email protected] Contents 1. Introduction .............................................................................................................................................. 2 2. Democracy and Peace ........................................................................................................................... 3 3. Voting and consensus finding ............................................................................................................ 4 3.1. Consensus Voting ........................................................................................................................... 5 3.2. Proxy Voting ..................................................................................................................................... 6 4. Democratic processes with ICTs ....................................................................................................... 6 4.1. E-Governance .................................................................................................................................. 7 4.2. E-Voting ............................................................................................................................................. 9 4.3. Example Software ....................................................................................................................... 11 5. Democratic processes within ICTs ............................................................................................... -
A Transatlantic Perspective on Blockchain Voting Systems
Stanford – Vienna Transatlantic Technology Law Forum A joint initiative of Stanford Law School and the University of Vienna School of Law TTLF Working Papers No. 49 The Limits of Blockchain Democracy: A Transatlantic Perspective on Blockchain Voting Systems Yoan Hermstrüwer 2020 TTLF Working Papers Editors: Siegfried Fina, Mark Lemley, and Roland Vogl About the TTLF Working Papers TTLF’s Working Paper Series presents original research on technology-related and business-related law and policy issues of the European Union and the US. The objective of TTLF’s Working Paper Series is to share “work in progress”. The authors of the papers are solely responsible for the content of their contributions and may use the citation standards of their home country. The TTLF Working Papers can be found at http://ttlf.stanford.edu. Please also visit this website to learn more about TTLF’s mission and activities. If you should have any questions regarding the TTLF’s Working Paper Series, please contact Vienna Law Professor Siegfried Fina, Stanford Law Professor Mark Lemley or Stanford LST Executive Director Roland Vogl at the Stanford-Vienna Transatlantic Technology Law Forum http://ttlf.stanford.edu Stanford Law School University of Vienna School of Law Crown Quadrangle Department of Business Law 559 Nathan Abbott Way Schottenbastei 10-16 Stanford, CA 94305-8610 1010 Vienna, Austria About the Author Yoan Hermstrüwer is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany. Prior to his academic career, he passed the First State Exam (J.D. equivalent) and the Second State Exam (bar exam equivalent). -
The Swedish Constitution and Social Democratic Power: Measuring the Mechanical E¡Ect of a Political Institution
Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 25 ^ No. 3, 2002 ISSN 0080^6757 # Nordic Political Science Association The Swedish Constitution and Social Democratic Power: Measuring the Mechanical E¡ect of a Political Institution Ellen M. Immergut* Recent discussions of Swedish political change have focused on the decline of Social Democratic `hegemony' and on the end of the `Swedish model'. In contrast to preference- or interest-driven explanations for these developments, this paper investigates the impact of constitutional changes made in 1969 in Sweden, which included the elimination of the Upper House or First Chamber of the Swedish parliament and the introduction of a more directly proportional electoral system. Using a simulation model, the actual electoral results from 1969 through 1994 were plugged into the formulas set forth by the old constitutional rules, in order to generate the number of parliamentary seats each party would have received under the old system. This simulation shows that the Social Democratic Party would have received a signi¢cantly larger share of parliamentary seats under the old constitutional rules than under the current constitution. Thus one can conclude that the new constitution decreased Social Democratic power in Sweden. A Change in the Rules of the Game In 1968 and 1969, the parliamentary representatives of the Swedish Social Democratic Party voted together with the political opposition for a partial revision of the Swedish constitution. This revision eliminated the indirectly elected Upper House (or First Chamber) of the Swedish parliament, and provided for a new, more proportional, system of electoral representation. Plans were made for incorporating these partial revisions into a total revision of the constitution ^ or more exactly, the 1809 Regeringsform or Instrument of Government, and the 1866 Riksdagsordning or Law on Parliament ^ which was eventually approved by the Swedish Riksdag in 1973 and 1974. -
T02P10 - Bias and Representation in Policy Making June 28 - 30, 2017 – Singapore
3rd International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP3) T02P10 - Bias and Representation in Policy Making June 28 - 30, 2017 – Singapore Delegated representation in the 21st Century: the experience of shared mandates. Leonardo Secchi1 Ricardo Cavalheiro2 Abstract This article presents shared mandate as a strategy for legislative representatives to be more responsive to constituents. Shared mandate is a form of delegated representation in which citizens determine the representative voting preference and legislative activity. A shared mandate can adopt many forms. This article discusses forms of shared mandates in terms of leadership, size, eligibility, access, permanence, distribution and extent of power, costs, benefits, and decision-making processes. The potential gains and risks of shared mandates are also discussed, illustrated by empirical cases of its adoption in five different countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Sweden and the United States. The conclusion is that shared mandates can bridge the gap between representative and direct democracy in theory and practice, making representation more responsive and accountable. Keywords: shared mandates, representative democracy; e-democracy. 1 Introduction Democracy is going through difficult times. The diagnosis of “erosion of democratic vitality” (FUNG & WRIGHT, 2003) is felt in symptoms of low electoral turnout, declining party membership, decreased trust in politicians, political parties and political institutions around the globe (SCHMITTER, 2013). According to Pitkin (2004), democracy came from ancient Greece as a participatory practice, and bore no relationship to representation. Representation as a political concept and practice dates “from the late medieval period, when it was imposed as a duty by the monarch” 1 Professor at Santa Catarina State University [email protected] 2 Ph.D Student, at Santa Catarina State University [email protected] 1 (PITKIN, 2004, p 335). -
Theories of Referendum and the Analysis of Agenda-Setting
THEORIES OF REFERENDUM AND THE ANALYSIS OF AGENDA-SETTING Thesis submitted for the PhD-degree Maija Talvikki Setala The London School of Economics and Political Science 1997 UMI Number: U109490 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U109490 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 74 7 Theories of Referendum and the Analysis of Agenda-Setting Abstract The referendum is often considered to be a form of direct democracy, and is often justified in terms of results representing the will of the majority. This view is disputable for three reasons: i) based on the results of social choice theory, it may be argued that the outcomes of referendums may be arbitrary and open to various interpretations; ii) it is debatable what the role of popular majorities should be in decision-making; many theorists of democracy think that unchecked majority rule shouldnot prevail; iii) because of the differences in agenda-setting, there is considerable functional variation between referendums. Different forms of referendums have also been justified by different theoretical arguments: popular initiatives have been promoted by radical democrats, whereas referendums used as a check on legislature have been supported by 'Madisonian' democrats.