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.

本篇研究提出一种新颖的形式化模型，称为 pander，研究了两种民主投票制度 RD 和 FRD 对于 pander 在单一和多个周期内的弹性应对方式，并使用强化学习方法研究了单一候选人和多组候选人 pander 的影响。