DiRe Committee : Diversity and Representation Constraints in Multiwinner Elections

Abstract

The causal mechanism between climate and political violence is fraught with complex mechanisms. Current quantitative causal models rely on one or more assumptions: (1) the climate drivers persistently generate conflict, (2) the causal mechanisms have a linear relationship with the conflict generation parameter, and/or (3) there is sufficient data to inform the prior distribution. Yet, we know conflict drivers often excite a social transformation process which leads to violence (e.g., drought forces agricultural producers to join urban militia), but further climate effects do not necessarily contribute to further violence. Therefore, not only is this bifurcation relationship highly non-linear, there is also often a lack of data to support prior assumptions for high resolution modeling. Here, we aim to overcome the aforementioned causal modeling challenges by proposing a neural forward-intensity Poisson process (NFIPP) model. The NFIPP is designed to capture the potential non-linear causal mechanism in climate induced political violence, whilst being robust to sparse and timing-uncertain data. Our results span 20 recent years and reveal an excitation-based causal link between extreme climate events and political violence across diverse countries. Our climate-induced conflict model results are cross-validated against qualitative climate vulnerability indices. Furthermore, we label historical events that either improve or reduce our predictability gain, demonstrating the importance of domain expertise in informing interpretation.

Temporal Fairness in Multiwinner Voting

“…The Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence of representation formulated for the setting of multiwinner elections with approval ballots, i.e., justified representation and its variants (Aziz et al 2017;Sánchez-Fernández et al 2017;Peters, Pierczyński, and Skowron 2021), to temporal scenarios, and study the associated computational problems; this direction has been explored by Bulteau et al (2021), Chandak, Goel, andPeters (2024), andElkind, Obraztsova, andTeh (2024), but many open problems remain. Other welfare goals in multiwinner elections such as diversity (Bredereck et al 2018;Celis, Huang, and Vishnoi 2018;Relia 2022) can similarly be explored. Another direction that one could pursue would be considering a generalization of existing multiwinner voting rules to the temporal setting (see, e.g., the work of Lackner (2020), and Chandak, Goel, and Peters (2024)), and investigating whether these rules satisfy the corresponding generalized temporal axioms (e.g., representation, as discussed above).…”

Combining Diversity and Excellence in Multiwinner Elections

“…Excellence and diversity are modelled by two axioms, namely justified envy-freeness and type optimality that we will present and discuss in detail later in this paper. Many other works are dedicated to the same framework; we can point the reader toward the works of Kagita et al (2021), Relia (2021), andThejaswi et al (2021), among others.…”