In representative democracies, the election of new representatives in regular election cycles is meant to prevent corruption and other misbehavior by elected officials and to keep them accountable in service of the ``will of the people." This democratic ideal can be undermined when candidates are dishonest when campaigning for election over these multiple cycles or rounds of voting. Much of the work on COMSOC to date has investigated strategic actions in only a single round. We introduce a novel formal model of \emph{pandering}, or strategic preference reporting by candidates seeking to be elected, and examine the resilience of two democratic voting systems to pandering within a single round and across multiple rounds. The two voting systems we compare are Representative Democracy (RD) and Flexible Representative Democracy (FRD). For each voting system, our analysis centers on the types of strategies candidates employ and how voters update their views of candidates based on how the candidates have pandered in the past. We provide theoretical results on the complexity of pandering in our setting for a single cycle, formulate our problem for multiple cycles as a Markov Decision Process, and use reinforcement learning to study the effects of pandering by both single candidates and groups of candidates across a number of rounds.

翻译：在代议民主制中，定期选举周期选出新代表旨在防止官员腐败及其他不当行为，并确保其服务于"人民意愿"。然而，当候选人在多轮竞选或投票中不诚实时，这一民主理想可能被削弱。迄今有关计算社会选择理论（COMSOC）的研究大多仅探讨单轮策略性行为。我们提出一个全新的"迎合行为"形式化模型，即候选人为了当选而进行的策略性偏好报告，并考察两种民主投票系统在单轮及多轮选举中对此行为的抵御能力。比较的两种投票系统分别为代议民主制（RD）和灵活代议民主制（FRD）。针对每种系统，我们的分析聚焦于候选人采用的策略类型，以及选民如何根据候选人过往的迎合行为更新对其的看法。我们提供单周期情境下迎合行为复杂性的理论结果，将多周期问题建模为马尔可夫决策过程，并运用强化学习研究单个及多个候选人在多轮选举中的迎合行为效应。