Understanding the Impact of Proportionality in Approval-Based Multiwinner Elections

Niclas Boehmer, Lara Glessen and Jannik Peters

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the computational complexity of several natural problems related to the behavior of proportionality axioms, and (ii) conducting an extensive experimental study on both real-world and synthetic elections. Our findings reveal substantial variation in the restrictiveness of proportionality across instances, including previously unobserved high levels of restrictiveness in some real-world cases. We also introduce and evaluate new measures for quantifying a candidate's importance for achieving proportional outcomes, which differ clearly from assessing candidate strength by approval score.

Date: 2025-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09479 Latest version (application/pdf)

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:arx:papers:2511.09479

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().