Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting rules, there is limited work that explicitly looks at the interplay of the deliberative process and voting. In this paper, we build a deliberation model using established models from the opinion-dynamics literature and study the effect of different deliberation mechanisms on voting outcomes achieved when using well-studied voting rules. Our results show that deliberation generally improves welfare and representation guarantees, but the results are sensitive to how the deliberation process is organized. We also show, experimentally, that simple voting rules, such as approval voting, perform as well as more sophisticated rules such as proportional approval voting or method of equal shares if deliberation is properly supported. This has ramifications on the practical use of such voting rules in citizen-focused democratic processes.

翻译：以公民为中心的民主进程中，参与者先对备选方案进行商议，再通过投票做出最终决策，这种做法如今日益普及。尽管计算社会选择文献已广泛探讨了投票规则，但明确研究商议过程与投票之间相互作用的成果仍较为有限。在本文中，我们利用意见动态文献中的成熟模型构建了一个商议模型，并研究了不同商议机制对采用经典投票规则时所得投票结果的影响。我们的结果表明，商议通常能改善福利和代表性保障，但结果对商议过程的组织方式较为敏感。我们还通过实验证明，简单的投票规则（如批准投票）在得到适当商议支持的情况下，其表现不逊于更复杂的规则（如比例批准投票或均分法）。这一发现对投票规则在公民民主实践中的实际应用具有重要影响。