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Since Downs proposed that the act of voting is irrational in 1957, myriad models have been proposed to explain voting and account for observed turnout patterns. We propose a model in which partisans consider both the instrumental and…
We model an electorate voting on the funding of a public good in a two-party system in an evolutionary game theory framework. Voters adopt one of four strategies: Consensus-makers, Gridlockers, Party 1 Zealots, and Party 2 Zealots, which…
Classical spatial models of two-party competition typically predict convergence to the median voter, yet real-world party systems often exhibit persistent and asymmetric polarization. We develop a spatial model of two-party competition in…
We consider a decision maker (DM) who, before taking an action, seeks information by allocating her limited attention dynamically over different news sources that are biased toward alternative actions. Endogenous choice of information…
We consider the relationship between economic activity and intervention, including monetary and fiscal policy, using a universal dynamic framework. Central bank policies are designed for growth without excess inflation. However,…
Labor unions influence economic outcomes not only through bargaining with employers over work contracts but also via political activities that can profoundly shape political systems. In unionized workplaces, they may mobilize and change the…
Social networks with positive and negative links often split into two antagonistic factions. Examples of such a split abound: revolutionaries versus an old regime, Republicans versus Democrats, Axis versus Allies during the second world…
We study the French-DeGroot opinion dynamics in a social network with two polarizing parties. We consider a network in which the leaders of one party are given, and we pose the problem of selecting the leader set of the opposing party so as…
Social media play an increasingly important role in political communication. Various studies investigated how individuals adopt social media for political discussion, to share their views about politics and policy, or to mobilize and…
There is a tight connection between credit access and voting. We show that uncertainty in access to credit pushes voters toward more conservative candidates in US elections. Using a 1% sample of the US population with valid credit reports,…
Political messages increasingly bundle economic policy arguments with moral social policy stances. Using survey experiments with roughly 6,500 U.S. adults, I show that such bundling sharply weakens economic persuasion among respondents who…
The voter model is a paradigm of ordering dynamics. At each time step, a random node is selected and copies the state of one of its neighbors. Traditionally, this state has been considered as a binary variable. Here, we relax this…
In this paper we examine a variant of the voter model on a dynamically changing network where agents have the option of changing their friends rather than changing their opinions. We analyse, in the context of dense random graphs, two…
The median-voter hypothesis (MVH) predicts convergence of two party platforms across a one-dimensional political spectrum during majoritarian elections. From the viewpoint of the MVH, an explanation of polarization is that each election has…
It is known that individual opinions on different policy issues often align to a dominant ideological dimension (e.g. "left" vs. "right") and become increasingly polarized. We provide an agent-based model that reproduces these two stylized…
The Bradley effect concerns the discrepancy between opinion polls and actual election outcomes that emerges when candidates do not exhibit ideological, sexual or racial mainstream features. This effect was first observed during the 1982…
Issue salience is a major determinant in voters' decisions. Candidates and political parties campaign to shift salience to their advantage - a process termed priming. We study the dynamics, strategies and equilibria of campaign spending for…
Building artificial intelligence (AI) that aligns with human values is an unsolved problem. Here, we developed a human-in-the-loop research pipeline called Democratic AI, in which reinforcement learning is used to design a social mechanism…
We develop a theory of distributive competition under redistricting that explains both electoral outcomes and the equilibrium allocation of policy benefits by endogenizing voter pivotality. In a multi-district model with primaries, general…
We investigate the dynamics of wealth inequality in an economy where households have positional preferences, with the strength of the positional concern determined endogenously by inequality of wealth distribution in the society. We…