Related papers: An Epidemiological Approach to the Spread of Polit…
The membership of British political parties has a direct influence on their political effectiveness. This paper applies the mathematics of epidemiology to the analysis of the growth and decline of such memberships. The party members are…
In this paper we extend some recent results on an operatorial approach to the description of alliances between political parties interacting among themselves and with a basin of electors. In particular, we propose and compare three…
The dynamics of political opinion are a critical component of modern society with large-scale implications for the evolution of intra- and international political discourse and policy. Here we utilize recent high-resolution survey data to…
We analyze the evolution of political organizations using a model in which agents change their opinions via two competing mechanisms. Two agents may interact and reach consensus, and additionally, individual agents may spontaneously change…
Defying the median voter theorem, party polarization has spread globally, especially in the United States. As concerns grow over its risks to democracy, political science has probed its causes, revealing two paradoxes: while polarization…
During epidemic outbreaks, information dissemination enhances individual protection, while social institutions influence the transmission through measures like government interventions, media campaigns, and hospital resource allocation.…
Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. The sources of influence can be generally divided into external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An…
The study of complex political phenomena such as parties' polarization calls for mathematical models of political systems. In this paper, we aim at modeling the time evolution of a political system whereby various parties selfishly interact…
We examine the effects of introducing a political outsider to the nomination process leading to an election. To this end, we develop a sequential game where politicians -- insiders and outsiders -- make a platform offer to a party, and…
Individuals are increasingly exposed to news and opinion from beyond national borders in a world that is becoming more and more globalised. This news and opinion is often concentrated in clusters of ideological homophily such as political…
In this work we consider a model of epidemic spreading coupled with an opinion dynamics in a fully-connected population. Regarding the opinion dynamics, the individuals may be in two distinct states, namely in favor or against a vaccination…
Agent-based models are versatile tools for studying how societal opinion change, including political polarization and cultural diffusion, emerges from individual behavior. This study expands agents' psychological realism using…
The related concepts of partisan belief systems, issue alignment, and partisan sorting are central to our understanding of politics. These phenomena have been studied using measures of alignment between pairs of topics, or how much…
We here study the behavior of political party members aiming at identifying how ideological communities are created and evolve over time in diverse (fragmented and non-fragmented) party systems. Using public voting data of both Brazil and…
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…
Infectious pathogens often propagate by superspreading, which focusses onward transmission on disproportionately few infected individuals. At the same time, infector-infectee pairs tend to have more similar transmission potentials than…
We study epidemic spreading processes in large networks, when the spread is assisted by a small number of external agents: infection sources with bounded spreading power, but whose movement is unrestricted vis-\`a-vis the underlying network…
We investigate the role of opinion leaders or influentials in the collective behavior of a social system. Opinion leaders are characterized by their unidirectional influence on other agents. We employ a model based on Axelrod's dynamics for…
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…
Extreme polarization can undermine democracy by making compromise impossible and transforming politics into a zero-sum game. Ideological polarization - the extent to which political views are widely dispersed - is already strong among…