Related papers: Dynamics of Strategic Three-Choice Voting
Political candidates often shift their positions opportunistically in hopes of capturing more votes. When there are only two candidates, the best strategy for each of them is often to move towards the other. This eventually results in two…
The drastic effect of local alliances in three-party competition is investigated in democratic hierarchical bottom-up voting. The results are obtained analytically using a model which extends a sociophysics frame introduced in 1986…
The outcomes of democratic elections rest on individuals' decision-making that is driven by their varying preferences and beliefs. Individuals may prefer consensus to gridlock, or gridlock to consensus, and information may be fractured via…
The median voter theorem has long been the default model of voter behavior and candidate choice. While contemporary work on the distribution of political opinion has emphasized polarization and an increasing gap between the "left" and the…
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…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
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…
We examine kinetic symmetry breaking phenomena in an evolutionary political game in which voters, inhabiting a multidimensional ideological space, cast ballots via selection mechanisms subject to the competing forces of conformity and…
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…
There are many situations in which mis-coordinated strategic voting can leave strategic voters worse off than they would have been had they not tried to strategize. We analyse the simplest of such scenarios, in which the set of strategic…
Are there voting methods which (i) give everyone, including minorities, an equal share of effective power even if voters act strategically, (ii) promote consensus rather than polarization and inequality, and (iii) do not favour the status…
Elections play a fundamental role in democratic societies, however they are often characterized by unexpected results. Here we discuss an election campaign model inspired by the compartmental epidemiology, and we show that the model…
In the traditional voting manipulation literature, it is assumed that a group of manipulators jointly misrepresent their preferences to get a certain candidate elected, while the remaining voters are truthful. In this paper, we depart from…
We study the voting problem with two alternatives where voters' preferences depend on a not-directly-observable state variable. While equilibria in the one-round voting mechanisms lead to a good decision, they are usually hard to compute…
Generalization of the minority game to more than one market is considered. At each time step every agent chooses one of its strategies and acts on the market related to this strategy. If the payoff function allows for strong fluctuation of…
Like many other voting systems, Majority Judgement suffers from the weaknesses of the underlying mathematical model: Elections as problem of choice or ranking. We show how the model can be enhanced to take into account the complete process…
We introduce a simple model of opinion dynamics in which binary-state agents evolve due to the influence of agents in a local neighborhood. In a single update step, a fixed-size group is defined and all agents in the group adopt the state…
We consider a system in which a group of agents represented by the vertices of a graph synchronously update their opinion based on that of their neighbours. If each agent adopts a positive opinion if and only if that opinion is sufficiently…
In many proportional parliamentary elections, electoral thresholds (typically 3-5%) are used to promote stability and governability by preventing the election of parties with very small representation. However, these thresholds often result…
We propose a new version of the spatial model of voting. Platforms of five parties are evolving in a two-dimensional landscape of political issues so as to get maximal numbers of voters. For a Gaussian landscape the evolution leads to a…