Perpetual Voting: Fairness in Long-Term Decision Making

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a new voting formalism to support long-term collective decision making: perpetual voting rules. These are voting rules that take the history of previous decisions into account. Due to this additional information, perpetual voting rules may offer temporal fairness guarantees that cannot be achieved in singular decisions. In particular, such rules may enable minorities to have a fair (proportional) influence on the decision process and thus foster long-term participation of minorities. This paper explores the proposed voting rules via an axiomatic analysis as well as a quantitative evaluation by computer simulations. We identify two perpetual voting rules as particularly recommendable in long-term collective decision making.