Fair algorithms for selecting citizens’ assemblies

Bailey Flanigan (), Paul Gölz (), Anupam Gupta, Brett Hennig and Ariel D. Procaccia ()
Additional contact information
Bailey Flanigan: Carnegie Mellon University
Paul Gölz: Carnegie Mellon University
Anupam Gupta: Carnegie Mellon University
Brett Hennig: Sortition Foundation
Ariel D. Procaccia: Harvard University

Nature, 2021, vol. 596, issue 7873, 548-552

Abstract: Abstract Globally, there has been a recent surge in ‘citizens’ assemblies’1, which are a form of civic participation in which a panel of randomly selected constituents contributes to questions of policy. The random process for selecting this panel should satisfy two properties. First, it must produce a panel that is representative of the population. Second, in the spirit of democratic equality, individuals would ideally be selected to serve on this panel with equal probability2,3. However, in practice these desiderata are in tension owing to differential participation rates across subpopulations4,5. Here we apply ideas from fair division to develop selection algorithms that satisfy the two desiderata simultaneously to the greatest possible extent: our selection algorithms choose representative panels while selecting individuals with probabilities as close to equal as mathematically possible, for many metrics of ‘closeness to equality’. Our implementation of one such algorithm has already been used to select more than 40 citizens’ assemblies around the world. As we demonstrate using data from ten citizens’ assemblies, adopting our algorithm over a benchmark representing the previous state of the art leads to substantially fairer selection probabilities. By contributing a fairer, more principled and deployable algorithm, our work puts the practice of sortition on firmer foundations. Moreover, our work establishes citizens’ assemblies as a domain in which insights from the field of fair division can lead to high-impact applications.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03788-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:596:y:2021:i:7873:d:10.1038_s41586-021-03788-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03788-6

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().