Toward Collective-Centric Evaluation of Preference Inference for Participatory Democracy
Read the original on arXiv AI →The paper examines how Preference Inference (PI) models used in large-scale participatory democracy platforms can alter the perceived consensus and minority support by predicting missing votes. It introduces a collective‑centric evaluation framework that assesses whether inferred votes maintain key properties of the overall preference landscape, rather than focusing solely on individual prediction accuracy. Using the largest multilingual dataset to date—four consultations with over 90,000 participants, 1 million votes, and 22 languages—the study finds that models with similar predictive accuracy can differ markedly in how well they preserve the collective structure, underscoring that accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating PI in democratic contexts.
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