The Complexity of Campaigning
This work addresses the problem of modeling voter preferences in political campaigning for researchers in computational social choice, but it is incremental as it builds on existing models.
The paper tackles the computational complexity of evaluating voter preferences and candidate strategies in a Boolean formula-based campaigning model, proving that voter utility evaluation is computationally hard, including #P-hardness in one case.
In "The Logic of Campaigning", Dean and Parikh consider a candidate making campaign statements to appeal to the voters. They model these statements as Boolean formulas over variables that represent stances on the issues, and study optimal candidate strategies under three proposed models of voter preferences based on the assignments that satisfy these formulas. We prove that voter utility evaluation is computationally hard under these preference models (in one case, #P-hard), along with certain problems related to candidate strategic reasoning. Our results raise questions about the desirable characteristics of a voter preference model and to what extent a polynomial-time-evaluable function can capture them.