Increasingly, scholars of legislative politics propose comparative analyses of parliamentary voting behavior across different countries and parliaments. Yet parliamentary voting procedures differ dramatically across parliamentary chambers and ignoring these differences may, in the extreme, lead to meaningless comparisons. In this paper we present a first glimpse at a comprehensive data collecti...

The unanimous voting rule is generally viewed as analogous to voluntary market exchange. I demonstrate that when third-party pecuniary effects exist, this analogy breaks down because unlike markets, unanimous voting requires compensation for these effects. Thus, the outcomes will be necessarily, and fundamentally, different. This compensation renders the political process less efficient, and gi...

Here we investigate how strategic adaptation changes our understanding and predictions of voting systems. We model populations of agents voting in multiple elections over time that revise their voting strategies based on electoral outcomes. Using this framework we examine the dynamic formation of electoral outcomes. Allowing agents to adapt their strategies refines the predictions of rational c...

We develop a model of issue-specific voting behavior. This model can be used to explore lawmakers’ personal voting patterns of voting by issue area, providing an exploratory window into how the language of the law is correlated with political support. We derive approximate posterior inference algorithms based on variational methods. Across 12 years of legislative data, we demonstrate both impro...

In this work, we study the behavior of Brazilian politicians and political parties with the help of clustering algorithms for signed social networks. For this purpose, we extract and analyze a collection of signed networks representing voting sessions of the lower house of Brazilian National Congress. We process all available voting data for the period between 2011 and 2016, by considering voti...

Voting procedures and technologies have to guarantee that elections are free and secure. Most of the procedural safeguards rely on the social context of the ballot. E-voting may seriously change this. If voters consider the new technology as less privacy protecting, as less secure, and as less accountable, they may change their voting behavior. This may influence their decision whether to parti...

Voting is a commonly used technique in combining results from peer experts. In distributed decision making systems, voting mechanisms are used to obtain a decision by incorporating the opinion of multiple units. Voting systems has many applications in fault tolerant systems, mutual exclusion in distributed systems, and replicated databases. We are specifically interested in voting systems as us...

In recent years, computer and network-based voting technologies have been gradually adopted for various elections. However, due to the fragile nature of electronic ballots and voting software, computer voting has posed serious security challenges. This chapter studies the security of computer voting and focuses on a cryptographic solution based on mix-nets. Like traditional voting systems, mix-...

An important research topic in the field of computational social choice is the complexity of various forms of dishonest behavior, such as manipulation, control, and bribery. While much of the work on this topic assumes that the cheating party has full information about the election, recently there have been a number of attempts to gauge the complexity of non-truthful behavior under uncertainty ...

Economic voting is one of the most important mechanisms on explaining voting behavior and on establishing the democratic accountability. However, people tend to use perceived national economic condition on evaluating the incumbent, which is known as sociotropic voting, instead of their pocketbook. Previous studies suggest both altruism and self-interested future expectation may help explain thi...