Election of government ministers

TL;DR

This paper explores a model where government ministers are directly elected by the people with a focus on achieving proportional representation using a modified approval voting method, supported by simulations and implementation.

Contribution

It introduces an implementation of the GreedyPAV algorithm for direct election of government members to ensure proportionality, validated through simulations and survey analysis.

Findings

GreedyPAV effectively maintains proportionality in elections.

Simulation results demonstrate improved minority representation.

Survey analysis supports the algorithm's practical applicability.

Abstract

The executive branch (the government) is usually not directly elected by the people, but is created by another elected body or person such as the parliament or the president. As a result, its members are not directly accountable to the people, individually or as a group. We propose a scenario where government members are directly elected by the people, and seek to achieve proportional representation in the process. We will present a formal model for the allocation of K offices, each associated with a disjoint set of candidates contesting for that seat. A group of voters provides ballots for each of the offices. Since using simple majority voting for each office independently may result in minority preferences being completely ignored, here we adapt the greedy version of proportional approval voting (GreedyPAV) to our framework. In the article Electing the Executive Branch you can find an in-depth explanation of the model and a demonstration - through computer-based simulations - of how voting for all offices together using this rule overcomes this weakness and upholds the axiom of proportionality. In this article, we will present the implementation of the algorithm (GreedyPAV) proposed by Rutvik Page, Ehud Shapiro, and Nimrod Talmon in the article mentioned above. In addition, we tested our implementation through a survey, the results of which will be presented and analyzed later in the article.