TY - GEN
T1 - Beyond the Echo Chamber
T2 - 24th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2025
AU - Barrett, Jake
AU - Gal, Kobi
AU - Michael, Loizos
AU - Vilenchik, Dan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org).
PY - 2025/1/1
Y1 - 2025/1/1
N2 - A Citizens' Assembly (CA) is a democratic innovation tool where a randomly selected group of citizens deliberate a topic over multiple rounds to generate, and then vote upon, policy recommendations. Despite growing popularity, little work exists on understanding how CA inputs, such as the expert selection process and the mixing method used for discussion groups, affect results, and therefore on how to systematically set such parameters to optimize the process. In this work, we model CA deliberation and opinion change as a Multi-Agent Systems problem. We introduce and formalise a set of criteria for evaluating successful CAs using insight from previous CA trials and theoretical results. Although real-world trials meet these criteria, we show that finding a model that does so is nontrivial; through simulations and theoretical arguments, we show that established opinion change models fail at least one of these criteria. This is an extended abstract of a JAAMAS article [2].
AB - A Citizens' Assembly (CA) is a democratic innovation tool where a randomly selected group of citizens deliberate a topic over multiple rounds to generate, and then vote upon, policy recommendations. Despite growing popularity, little work exists on understanding how CA inputs, such as the expert selection process and the mixing method used for discussion groups, affect results, and therefore on how to systematically set such parameters to optimize the process. In this work, we model CA deliberation and opinion change as a Multi-Agent Systems problem. We introduce and formalise a set of criteria for evaluating successful CAs using insight from previous CA trials and theoretical results. Although real-world trials meet these criteria, we show that finding a model that does so is nontrivial; through simulations and theoretical arguments, we show that established opinion change models fail at least one of these criteria. This is an extended abstract of a JAAMAS article [2].
KW - Citizens' Assemblies
KW - Opinion Change
KW - Participatory Democracy
KW - Social Influence
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105009868042
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:105009868042
T3 - Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS
SP - 3068
EP - 3070
BT - Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2025
A2 - Vorobeychik, Yevgeniy
A2 - Das, Sanmay
A2 - Nowe, Ann
PB - International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS)
Y2 - 19 May 2025 through 23 May 2025
ER -
