What is it about?
Elections are the central institution of democracy and are always special moments of intense public attention. However, elections systematically lead to a debate about representativity: do the elected bodies represent the population well enough? To address this challenge of representation, we have designed a novel participatory electoral process coined the Representation Pact, implemented with the support of a computational system. The process is mainly meant for political parties, or more generally civil society organizations, to make sure that lists of candidates are more representative. It could also be used for the elections themselves. How does the Representation Pact work? It works in two rounds. During the first round, voters can decide on representation criteria: how exactly should the list of candidates represent members/population, e.g. in terms of gender diversity, age, etc? In a second round, voters can vote for candidates. After the two rounds, a counting method is applied, which selects the committee of candidates that maximizes the number of votes received in the second round, conditioned on satisfying the criteria provided in the first round. Try it ! A free and open-source platform allowing you to use the Representation Pact in your own elections is available at www.fairelection.ch
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Why is it important?
Improving representativity in election processes is key for the legitimacy of democracy. Our approach is meant to contribute to a better legitimacy in several dimensions of democracy. It is firstly about the representativity of lists of candidates, directly linked to the functioning of political parties and their ambition to speak in the name of specific parts of the population. It is secondly about equality of opportunity for all people who want to be active in politics and who have to struggle more than others because of the social groups they belong to (eg. gender, ethnicity or age). It is thirdly about the quality of the work of elected bodies which better represent the population they stand for and therefore contribute to just political decisions. With the help of a detailed use case that applied this process to a primary election of 96 representatives in Switzerland, we identify lessons learnt that are applicable to participatory computational systems used in societal or political contexts. Good practices are identified and presented.
Perspectives
The Representation Pact provides an actionable tool to organize fair elections and trigger a democratic discussion about representation in elected bodies. Moreover, this paper is a great example of research embedded into social and political life. The case-study upon which the paper is built is itself the result of a cooperation between a research institution (EPFL) and a civil society organization. The real election which was organized was the opportunity to test the computational approach and to identify best practices. The paper puts this real-life experience into the broader literature on democracy and representation.
Florian Evequoz
HES-SO Valais Wallis
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This page is a summary of: Diverse Representation via Computational Participatory Elections - Lessons from a Case Study, October 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3551624.3555297.
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