PRO-DEMOCRATIC

The goal of the project is to design new generic election rules, protocols and algorithms that ensure proportionality—an equal treatment of implicit groups of voters (i.e., groups that are not declared upfront). We plan to prove theorems establishing whether our notions of proportionality are satisfiable, specifically when combined with other desirable properties, and formally justifying that our new rules are proportional. We plan to design efficient algorithms for the problem of finding proportional public decisions.


Team

Principal Investigator

Piotr Skowron, Associate Professor

Team Members

Oskar Skibski, Associate Professor


Georgios Papasotiropoulos, Postdoctoral Researcher


Grzegorz Pierczyński, Postdoctoral Researcher


Seyedeh Zeinab Pishbin, Intern Researcher


Former Team Members

Jana Masaříková (Postdoctoral Researcher)

Stanisław Kaźmierowski (PhD student)


Publications

Georgios Papasotiropoulos, Seyedeh Zeinab Pishbin, Oskar Skibski, Piotr Skowron, Tomasz Was: Method of Equal Shares with Bounded Overspending. EC 2025: to appear. ArXiv

Sonja Kraiczy, Georgios Papasotiropoulos, Grzegorz Pierczynski, Piotr Skowron: Proportionality in Thumbs Up and Down Voting. 2025. ArXiv

Georgios Papasotiropoulos, Oskar Skibski, Piotr Skowron, Tomasz Was: Proportional Selection in Networks. 2025. ArXiv

Georgios Amanatidis, Michael Lampis, Evangelos Markakis, Georgios Papasotiropoulos: On the Tractability Landscape of Conditional Minisum Approval Voting Rule. Information Processing Letters (special issue on Economics and Computation). 2025. PDF

Georgios Papasotiropoulos, Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin: Liquid Democracy: An Annotated Reading List. ACM SIGecom Exchanges. 2025. PDF

Evangelos Markakis, Georgios Papasotiropoulos: On the Complexity of Winner Determination and Strategic Control in Conditional Approval Voting. Theoretical Computer Science. 2025. ArXiv

Shiri Alouf-Heffetz, Łukasz Janeczko, Grzegorz Lisowski, Georgios Papasotiropoulos: The Cost Perspective of Liquid Democracy: Feasibility and Control. AAAI 2025: 13538-13545. PDF

Stanisław Kaźmierowski: Equilibria of the Colonel Blotto Games with Costs. AAAI 2025: 13969-13976. PDF

Tomás Masarík, Grzegorz Pierczynski, Piotr Skowron: A Generalised Theory of Proportionality in Collective Decision Making. EC 2024: 734-754. ArXiv

Piotr Faliszewski, Lukasz Janeczko, Andrzej Kaczmarczyk, Grzegorz Lisowski, Piotr Skowron, Stanislaw Szufa: Strategic Cost Selection in Participatory Budgeting. 2024. ArXiv

Niclas Boehmer, Piotr Faliszewski, Lukasz Janeczko, Dominik Peters, Grzegorz Pierczynski, Simon Schierreich, Piotr Skowron, Stanislaw Szufa: Evaluation of Project Performance in Participatory Budgeting. IJCAI 2024: 2678-2686. PDF

Georgios Amanatidis, Aris Filos-Ratsikas, Philip Lazos, Evangelos Markakis, Georgios Papasotiropoulos: On the Potential and Limitations of Proxy Voting: Delegation with Incomplete Votes. AAMAS 2024: 49-57. PDF

Evangelos Markakis, Georgios Papasotiropoulos: As Time Goes By: Adding a Temporal Dimension Towards Resolving Delegations in Liquid Democracy. ADT 2024: 48-63. PDF


Hosted Visitors


Research Dissemination

Highlights: The Method of Equal Shares with Bounded Overspending, introduced in our publication accepted at EC’25, has been selected by the city council for use in the upcoming Participatory Budgeting process in Pruszków, Poland. This will be the largest known budget globally to be allocated using a method with formal fairness guarantees.

Workshops where our work was presented (peer-reviewed): Workshop on New Directions in Social Choice (in conjunction with EC, Stanford, 2025),  Conference of the European Network for Digital Democracy (Paris, 2025), Amsterdam/Saint-Etienne Workshop on Social Choice (Amsterdam, 2025), Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare (Paris, 2024), Workshop on Fairness in Operations Research (Bellairs Research Institute, Barbados, 2024).

Research Visits: AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland (x2)


The Pro-Democratic project
has received funding from
the European Research Council

ERC, grant agreement No 101076570