Preference Aggregation as Social Dialogue: Integrating Deliberative Features into Ranked-Choice and Proportional Voting

Most current frameworks, as highlighted by Bardal et al. (2025) and the participatory budgeting studies (Yang et al., 2023), treat preference aggregation as a one-time, isolated event. Inspired by deliberative democracy, this idea proposes building and testing a “dynamic” RCV or proportional voting platform—where voters can tentatively submit rankings, see anonymized aggregate trends, and iteratively adjust their ballots before the final tally. This would simulate aspects of consensus-building and social learning missing from current systems. Research would explore whether such iterative aggregation leads to more proportional, fair, or satisfying outcomes, especially for minorities or less-engaged voters. This fundamentally reframes voting as a process of social negotiation, not just private expression—potentially bridging the gap between deliberation and aggregation in electoral theory.

References:

1. Proportional Representation in Practice: Quantifying Proportionality in Ordinal Elections. Tuva Bardal, Markus Brill, David McCune, Jannik Peters (2025). AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
2. Designing Digital Voting Systems for Citizens: Achieving Fairness and Legitimacy in Participatory Budgeting. Joshua C. Yang, C. I. Hausladen, Dominik Peters, Evangelos Pournaras, Regula Hnggli Fricker, Dirk Helbing (2023). Digit. Gov. Res. Pract..