# Representative Ranking for Deliberation in the Public Sphere

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18962 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18962/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Preventing Fairness Gerrymandering: Auditing and Learning for Subgroup Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05144/) (2017)
- [Improving fairness in machine learning systems: What do industry practitioners need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05239/) (2018)
- [A New Generation of Perspective API: Efficient Multilingual Character-level Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11176/) (2022)
- [Collective Constitutional AI: Aligning a Language Model with Public Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07814/) (2024)
- [Generative Social Choice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01291/) (2023)
- [Justified Representation in Approval-Based Committee Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.8269/) (2014)
- [A Survey on Intersectional Fairness in Machine Learning: Notions, Mitigation, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06969/) (2023)
- [Proportional Justified Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09928/) (2016)
- [Embedding Democratic Values into Social Media AIs via Societal Objective Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13912/) (2023)
- [Robust and Verifiable Proportionality Axioms for Multiwinner Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01989/) (2023)
- [Fairness and Diversity in Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04644/) (2023)
- [Proportionality and the Limits of Welfarism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11747/) (2019)
- [Representativeness in Statistics, Politics, and Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03827/) (2021)
- [Bridging Systems: Open Problems for Countering Destructive Divisiveness across Ranking, Recommenders, and Governance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09976/) (2023)
- [Democratic Policy Development using Collective Dialogues and AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02242/) (2023)
- [Efficiently Learning Mixtures of Mallows Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05731/) (2018)
- [Representation with Incomplete Votes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15608/) (2022)
- ['Generative CI' through Collective Response Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00672/) (2023)
- [Proportional Rankings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01434/) (2016)
- [Classifying Constructive Comments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05476/) (2020)
- [Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14652/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Proportional Rankings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08043/) (2021)
- [The Price of Justified Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05994/) (2021)
- [Justifying Groups in Multiwinner Approval Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12949/) (2021)
- [Re-Ranking News Comments by Constructiveness and Curiosity Significantly Increases Perceived Respect, Trustworthiness, and Interest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05429/) (2024)
- [Robustness of Greedy Approval Rules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00750/) (2022)
- [Combining Voting and Abstract Argumentation to Understand Online Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05895/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Strengthening Proportionality in Temporal Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22513/) (2025)
- [Toward Collective-Centric Evaluation of Preference Inference for Participatory Democracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02990/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Online comment sections, such as those on news sites or social media, have the potential to foster informal public deliberation, However, this potential is often undermined by the frequency of toxic or low-quality exchanges that occur in these settings. To combat this, platforms increasingly leverage algorithmic ranking to facilitate higher-quality discussions, e.g., by using civility classifiers or forms of prosocial ranking. Yet, these interventions may also inadvertently reduce the visibility of legitimate viewpoints, undermining another key aspect of deliberation: representation of diverse views. We seek to remedy this problem by introducing guarantees of representation into these methods. In particular, we adopt the notion of justified representation (JR) from the social choice literature and incorporate a JR constraint into the comment ranking setting. We find that enforcing JR leads to greater inclusion of diverse viewpoints while still being compatible with optimizing for user engagement or other measures of conversational quality.