Measuring a Priori Voting Power – Taking Delegations Seriously

01/06/2023

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by   Rachael Colley, et al.

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We introduce new power indices to measure the a priori voting power of voters in liquid democracy elections where an underlying network restricts delegations. We argue that our power indices are natural extensions of the standard Penrose-Banzhaf index in simple voting games. We show that computing the criticality of a voter is #P-hard even when voting weights are polynomially-bounded in the size of the instance. However, for specific settings, such as when the underlying network is a bipartite or complete graph, recursive formulas can compute these indices for weighted voting games in pseudo-polynomial time. We highlight their theoretical properties and provide numerical results to illustrate how restricting the possible delegations can alter voters' voting power.