Related papers: Should the democrats move to the left on economic …
First-best climate policy is a uniform carbon tax which gradually rises over time. Civil servants have complicated climate policy to expand bureaucracies, politicians to create rents. Environmentalists have exaggerated climate change to…
Research on the causes of political polarization points towards multiple drivers of the problem, from social and psychological to economic and technological. However, political institutions stand out, because -- while capable of…
In linear models of consensus dynamics, the state of the various agents converges to a value which is a convex combination of the agents' initial states. We call it democratic if in the large scale limit (number of agents going to infinity)…
Selecting representatives based on voters' preferences is a fundamental problem in social choice theory. While cardinal utility functions offer a detailed representation of preferences, ordinal rankings are often the only available…
Recent empirical findings suggest that societies have become more polarized in various countries. That is, the median voter of today represents a smaller fraction of society compared to two decades ago and yet, the mechanisms underlying…
Despite many examples to the contrary, most models of elections assume that rules determining the winner will be followed. We present a model where elections are solely a public signal of the incumbent popularity, and citizens can protests…
This paper models the US-China trade conflict and attempts to analyze the (optimal) strategic choices. In contrast to the existing literature on the topic, we employ the expected utility theory and examine the conflict mathematically. In…
Some argue that political stability is best served through a two-party system. This study refutes this. The author mathematically defines the stability and rigidity of electoral systems comprised of any quantity of electors and parties. In…
For many economic questions, the empirical results are not interesting unless they are strong. For these questions, theorizing before the results are known is not always optimal. Instead, the optimal sequencing of theory and empirics trades…
Several measures of partisan bias are reviewed for single member districts with two dominant parties. These include variants of the simple bias that considers only deviation of seats from 50% at statewide 50% vote. Also included are…
I study the optimal voting mechanism for a committee that must decide whether to enact or block a policy of unknown benefit. Information can come both from committee members who can acquire it at cost, and a strategic lobbyist who wishes…
Ensuring transparency and integrity in political communication on climate change has arguably never been more important than today. Yet we know little about how politicians focus on, talk about, and portray climate change on social media.…
The goal of multi-winner elections is to choose a fixed-size committee based on voters' preferences. An important concern in this setting is representation: large groups of voters with cohesive preferences should be adequately represented…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
There are many factors that can influence the outcome of an election. We here identify two dominant effects that can affect the votes obtained by a candidate, namely, the Majority Effect and the Media Effect. We mimic these two effects in a…
Accounting for undecided and uncertain voters is a challenging issue for predicting election results from public opinion polls. Undecided voters typify the uncertainty of swing voters in polls but are often ignored or allocated to each…
We introduce a simple, geometric model of opinion polarization. It is a model of political persuasion, as well as marketing and advertising, utilizing social values. It focuses on the interplay between different topics and persuasion…
We present a model for quantitatively identifying swing voters in congressional elections. This is achieved by predicting an individual voter's likelihood to vote and an individual voter's likelihood to vote for a given party, if he votes.…
Motivated by empirical research on bias and opinion formation, we formulate a multidimensional nonlinear opinion-dynamical model where agents have individual biases, which are fixed, as well as opinions, which evolve. The dimensions…
An ability to infer the political leaning of social media users can help in gathering opinion polls thereby leading to a better understanding of public opinion. While there has been a body of research attempting to infer the political…