Proportionality for Constrained Public Decisions

Abstract

We study situations where a group of voters need to take a collective decision over a number of public issues, with the goal of getting a result that reflects the voters' opinions in a proportional manner. Our focus is on interconnected public decisions, where the decision on one or more issues has repercussions on the acceptance or rejection of other public issues in the agenda. We show that the adaptations of classical justified-representation axioms to this enriched setting are always satisfiable only for restricted classes of public agendas. However, the use of suitably adapted well-known decision rules on a class of quite expressive constraints, yields proportionality guarantees that match these justified-representation properties in an approximate sense. We also identify another path to achieving proportionality via an adaptation of the notion of priceability.