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An assembly of $n$ voters needs to decide on $t$ independent binary issues. Each voter has opinions about the issues, given by a $t$-bit vector. Anscombe's paradox shows that a policy following the majority opinion in each issue may not…
The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum,…
We study how office-seeking parties use direct democracy to shape elections. A party with a strong electoral base can benefit from using a binding referendum to resolve issues that divide its core supporters. When referendums do not bind,…
In many instances of election, the electorate appears to be a composite of partisan and independent voters. Given that partisans are not likely to convert to a different party, a main goal for a party could be to mobilize independent voters…
In recent years, in an effort to promote fairness in the election process, a wide variety of techniques and metrics have been proposed to determine whether a map is a partisan gerrymander. The most accessible measures, requiring easily…
We study how motivated reasoning affects the provision of climate policy in an electoral competition framework. Voters experience anticipatory disutility when future outcomes appear grim and may therefore distort beliefs in response to…
A sociophysical model for opinion dynamics is shown to embody a series of recent western hung national votes all set at the unexpected and very improbable edge of a fifty-fifty score. It started with the Bush-Gore 2000 American presidential…
Donald Trump was lagging behind in nearly all opinion polls leading up to the 2016 US presidential election, but he surprisingly won the election. This raises the following important questions: 1) why most opinion polls were not accurate in…
The question of how people vote strategically under uncertainty has attracted much attention in several disciplines. Theoretical decision models have been proposed which vary in their assumptions on the sophistication of the voters and on…
This study considers a simple variation of the voter model with two competing parties. In particular, we represent the case of political elections, where people can choose to support one of the two candidates or to remain neutral. People…
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
Would artificial intelligence (AI) cut interest rates or adopt conservative monetary policy? Would it deregulate or opt for a more controlled economy? As AI use by economic policymakers, academics, and market participants grows…
What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good,…
Political sectarianism is fueled in part by misperceptions of political opponents: People commonly overestimate the support for extreme policies among members of the other party. Research suggests that correcting partisan misperceptions by…
We develop an equilibrium theory of attention and politics. In a spatial model of electoral competition where candidates have varying policy preferences, we examine what kinds of political behaviors capture voters' limited attention and how…
Popularity is a critical success factor for a politician and her/his party to win in elections and implement their plans. Finding the reasons behind the popularity can provide a stable political movement. This research attempts to measure…
The strongly polarizing political discourse in the U. S. implies that a small minority of the population, determining the outcome of the presidential elections in a few so called battleground-states, also determines the outcome of the…
This paper combines a canonical epidemiology model of disease dynamics with government policy of lockdown and testing, and agents' decision to social distance in order to avoid getting infected. The model is calibrated with data on deaths…
We study candidates' positioning when adjustments are possible in response to new information about voters' preferences. Re-positioning allows candidates to get closer to the median voter but is costly both financially and electorally. We…
The challenge of understanding the collective behaviors of social systems can benefit from methods and concepts from physics [1-6], not because humans are similar to electrons, but because certain large-scale behaviors can be understood…