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October 16, 20250 citationsOpen Access

What Voting Rules Actually Do: A Data-Driven Analysis of Multi-Winner Voting

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JCJoshua CaiataUniversity of WaterlooBABen ArmstrongTulane UniversityKLKate LarsonGoogle (United States)

Key Points

  • Voting rules often violate axioms in practice, and addressing this through data-driven analysis reveals key insights.
  • Using preference distributions, neural networks can outperform traditional voting rules by minimizing axiom violations.
  • The study promotes a new approach to evaluating multi-winner voting rules outside the worst-case scenarios conventionally employed.
  • Findings highlight the potential for data-driven methodologies to inform and improve the design of future voting systems.

Abstract

Committee-selection problems arise in many contexts and applications, and there has been increasing interest within the social choice research community on identifying which properties are satisfied by different multi-winner voting rules. In this work, we propose a data-driven framework to evaluate how frequently voting rules violate axioms across diverse preference distributions in practice, shifting away from the binary perspective of axiom satisfaction given by worst-case analysis. Using this framework, we analyze the relationship between multi-winner voting rules and their axiomatic performance under several preference distributions. We then show that neural networks, acting as voting rules, can outperform traditional rules in minimizing axiom violations. Our results suggest that data-driven approaches to social choice can inform the design of new voting systems and support the continuation of data-driven research in social choice.

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Cite This Study

Caiata et al. (2025) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/68f12bfb2107091eab27a358https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2508.06454
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