Selecting Representative Bodies: An Axiomatic View

Manon Revel, Niclas Boehmer, Rachael Colley, Markus Brill, Piotr Faliszewski, Edith Elkind

Abstract: As the world's democratic institutions are challenged by dissatisfied citizens, political scientists and computer scientists have proposed and analyzed various (innovative) methods to select representative bodies, a crucial task in every democracy. However, a unified framework to analyze and compare different selection mechanisms is largely missing. To address this gap, we advocate employing concepts and tools from computational social choice to devise a model in which different selection mechanisms can be formalized. Such a model would allow for conceptualizing and evaluating desirable representation axioms. We make the first step in this direction by proposing a unifying mathematical formulation of different selection mechanisms as well as various social-choice-inspired axioms such as proportionality and monotonicity.