Research map / Learning theory and algorithms / Prediction and decision losses
Towards a More Burkean Approach to Computational Social Choice
Read the paperCheck your idea against 108,967 papers
AI-extracted summary. Written by AI from the paper's full text. Numbers and claims can be wrong or missing context, so check the paper before you cite or build on it.
A position paper arguing that computational social choice should study widely used real-world mechanisms (especially parties/sub-groups and executive capacity) in a Burkean, incremental way rather than radical new voting systems like liquid democracy, blockchain voting, and sortition.
Problem
Much computational social choice research focuses on novel, radical decision mechanisms (liquid democracy, blockchain, sortition) that are rarely used or implemented in realistic settings, while under-studying established mechanisms such as parties and sub-groups.
Approach
Advocates a Burkean, incremental research agenda that studies existing large-scale decision mechanisms, focusing on parties and sub-groups of voters and candidates (district elections, intra-party elections) and proposes an ε-robustness definition of executive capacity as a research direction.
Key results
- Proposes a formal definition of executive capacity: a candidate is ε-robust if it still wins under any perturbation of voter and candidate positions by less than ε in a metric space, and the mechanism's executive capacity XC is the threshold ε at which robustness breaks.
- Identifies open problems for district-elections, such as bounds on distortion when each district uses plurality, noting that single-member plurality districts cannot guarantee proportional outcomes.
Limitations
- No experiments or empirical evaluation; contribution is a research agenda and critique
- Critique of liquid democracy, blockchain, and sortition is argued rather than empirically tested
- Authors acknowledge the ε-robustness definition is only one of many possible definitions
Experimental setup
Builds on: Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France distortion metric (Procaccia and Rosenschein 2006) district-elections (Bachrach et al. 2016) proxy voting (Cohensius et al. 2017)
Closest papers by meaning
- Position: Social Choice Should Guide AI Alignment in Dealing with Diverse Human Feedback (ICML 2024 · similarity 0.85)
- Weak Strategyproofness in Randomized Social Choice (AAAI 2025 · similarity 0.84)
- Strategic Manipulation in Temporal Voting with Undesirable Candidates (Student Abstract) (AAAI 2025 · similarity 0.84)
- Proportional Aggregation of Preferences for Sequential Decision Making (AAAI 2024 · similarity 0.84)
- Position: Social Environment Design Should be Further Developed for AI-based Policy-Making (ICML 2024 · similarity 0.84)
- Unravelling Expressive Delegations: Complexity and Normative Analysis (AAAI 2024 · similarity 0.84)
Writing a paper in this area? scime draft is a free LaTeX editor with AI included, real-time co-authors and a check of your references and venue rules before you submit. It also imports OpenAI Prism projects.