Related papers: Growth Model for Vote Distributions in Elections
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…
In accordance with "Democracy's Effect on Development: More Questions than Answers", we seek to carry out a study in following the description in the 'Questions for Further Study.' To that end, we studied 33 countries in the Sub-Saharan…
Today, our more-than-ever digital lives leave significant footprints in cyberspace. Large scale collections of these socially generated footprints, often known as big data, could help us to re-investigate different aspects of our social…
We focus on the election manipulation problem through social influence, where a manipulator exploits a social network to make her most preferred candidate win an election. Influence is due to information in favor of and/or against one or…
Many networks do not live in isolation but are strongly interacting, with profound consequences on their dynamics. Here, we consider the case of two interacting social networks and, in the context of a simple model, we address the case of…
Numerous models in opinion dynamics focus on the temporal dynamics within a single electoral unit (e.g., country). The empirical observations, on the other hand, are often made across multiple electoral units (e.g., polling stations) at a…
In the past, the Voter Model has been explicitly used to model the impact of propaganda on a dynamic, interconnected population, and certain factors have been identified that influence the behavior of voters when under outside influence.…
Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…
We investigate a variation of the classical voter model in which the set of influencing agents depends on an individual's current opinion. The initial population consists of a random sample of equally sized sub-populations for each state,…
Majority-vote model is a much-studied model for social opinion dynamics of two competing opinions. With the recent appreciation that our social network comprises a variety of different layers forming a multiplex network, a natural question…
We introduce the confident voter model, in which each voter can be in one of two opinions and can additionally have two levels of commitment to an opinion --- confident and unsure. Upon interacting with an agent of a different opinion, a…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
According to mass media theory, the dissemination of messages and the evolution of opinions in social networks follow a two-step process. First, opinion leaders receive the message from the message sources, and then they transmit their…
A national voting population, when segmented into groups like, for example, different states, can yield a counter-intuitive scenario where the winner may not necessarily get the most number of total votes. A recent example is the 2016…
The standard three-state voter model is enlarged by including the outside pressure favouring one of the three choices and by adding some biased internal random noise. The Monte Carlo simulations are motivated by states with the population…
Election control considers the problem of an adversary who attempts to tamper with a voting process, in order to either ensure that their favored candidate wins (constructive control) or another candidate loses (destructive control). As…
Prediction markets are often used as mechanisms to aggregate information about a future event, for example, whether a candidate will win an election. The event is typically assumed to be exogenous. In reality, participants may influence the…
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…
Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…
Voting is a very general method of preference aggregation. A voting rule takes as input every voter's vote (typically, a ranking of the alternatives), and produces as output either just the winning alternative or a ranking of the…