Poor decisions and selfish behaviors give rise to seemingly intractable global problems, such as the lack of transparency in democratic processes, the spread of conspiracy theories, and the rise in greenhouse gas emissions. However, people are more predict ...
Parliament dynamics might seem erratic at times. Predicting future voting patterns could support policy design based on the simulation of voting scenarios. The availability of open data on legislative activities and machine learning tools might enable such ...
This thesis is composed of two essays that study the effectiveness of shareholder democracy.In the first essay, I analyze the firm value implications of shareholder-initiated proposals. I show that managerial resistance precludes half of shareholder-init ...
While technology is often claimed to be “democratizing”, the technologizing of society has more often yielded undemocratic or even anti-democratic outcomes. Is technology fundamentally at odds with democracy, or is it merely a rich and infinitely-adaptable ...
We study the phenomenon of intransitivity in models of dice and voting. First, we follow a recent thread of research for n-sided dice with pairwise ordering induced by the probability, relative to 1/2, that a throw from one die is higher than the other. We ...
The strongest threat model for voting systems considers coercion resistance: protection against coercers that force voters to modify their votes, or to abstain. Existing remote voting systems either do not provide this property; require expensive operation ...
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the voting process on the ...
Scholarly studies and common accounts of national politics enjoy pointing out the resilience of ideological divides among populations. Building on the image of political cleavages and geographic polarization, the regionalization of politics has become a tr ...
In this dissertation, I address the political and moral geography of Swiss federal participatory votes for the period between 1981 and 2014 to re-investigate some of the fundamental questions left open in urban sciences: how and why socio-ethical, moral an ...
We consider online predictions of vote results, where regions across a country vote on an issue under discussion. Such online predictions before and during the day of the vote are useful to media agencies, polling institutes, and political parties, e.g., t ...
