|Talks|

Governance as a complex, networked, democratic, satisfiability problem

Complexity Speaker Series
Hybrid
Past Talk
Juniper Lovato
Assistant Professor, University of Vermont
Fri, Apr 18, 2025
3:00 PM UTC
Fri, Apr 18, 2025
3:00 PM UTC
In-person
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK

Talk recording

Democratic governments comprise a subset of a population whose goal is to produce coherent decisions that solve societal challenges while respecting the will of the people they represent. New governance frameworks represent this problem as a social network rather than as a hierarchical pyramid with centralized authority. But how should this network be structured? To investigate this question, we model the set of decisions a population must make as a satisfiability problem and the structure of information flow involved in decision-making as a social hypergraph. This allows us to consider the benefits of different governance structures, from dictatorships to direct democracy. In between these extremes, we find a regime of effective governance where decision groups are formed as needed by key stakeholders to discuss and make specific decisions. This regime of effective governance allows even incoherent or polarized populations to make coherent decisions at low coordination costs. More broadly, we present not just simulation results, but a modeling framework that can be used to explore the costs and benefits of a wide range of governance strategies using bottom-up approaches and their ability to tackle decision problems that challenge standard governments. Pre-print:https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03421

About the speaker
Juniper Lovato is a researcher in the field of complex systems and data science. Her current research is centered around data ethics, fairness, accountability, transparency, the science of stories, and open-source ecosystems. Drawing from a diverse set of disciplines, including computational social science, computer science, complex systems, and networks, she applies various tools and methods to explore these critical areas. She is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Vermont and a member of the Vermont Complex Systems Institute. She earned her Ph.D. in Complex Systems & Data Science at the University of Vermont, where she now leads the Computational Ethics Lab.
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Apr 18, 2025