Related papers: Modelling sources of ecological fallacy within a r…

We provide a simple formulation of the conditions under which ecological bias should be expected and argue that the bias will affect any method of ecological inference; our claim is supported by formal derivations and several examples where…

Empirical analyses on the factors driving vote switching are rare, usually conducted at the national level without considering the parties of origin and destination, and often unreliable due to the severe inaccuracy of recall survey data.…

This paper deals with the issue of ecological bias in ecological inference. We provide an explicit formulation of the conditions required for the ordinary ecological regression to produce unbiased estimates and argue that, when these…

We model voting behaviour in the multi-group setting of a two-tier voting system using sequences of de Finetti measures. Our model is defined by using the de Finetti representation of a probability measure (i.e. as a mixture of…

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…

Despite its shortcomings, cross-level or ecological inference remains a necessary part of some areas of quantitative inference, including in United States voting rights litigation. Ecological inference suffers from a lack of identification…

Human dynamics and sociophysics suggest statistical models that may explain and provide us with better insight into social phenomena. Contextual and selection effects tend to produce extreme values in the tails of rank-ordered distributions…

Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…

Bayesian model comparison is often based on the posterior distribution over the set of compared models. This distribution is often observed to concentrate on a single model even when other measures of model fit or forecasting ability…

Randomized experiments have long been the gold standard for scientists seeking to learn about cause and effect. When randomized experiments are infeasible, scientists often resort to observational studies, which are widely available and…

We consider a problem of ecological inference, in which individual-level covariates are known, but labeled data is available only at the aggregate level. The intended application is modeling voter preferences in elections. In Rosenman and…

This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…

A model of the opinion dynamics underlying the political decision is proposed. The analysis is restricted to a bipolar scheme with a possible third political area. The interaction among voters is local but the final decision strongly…

Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that adversely affects management decisions, and mathematical modelling is an aid to its detailed understanding. Bias in opinion update about the value of a parameter is modelled here assuming that…

Collective decision-making is a process by which a group of individuals determines a shared outcome that shapes societal dynamics; from innovation diffusion to organizational choices. A common approach to model these processes is using…

We consider an idealized model in which individuals' changing opinions and their social network coevolve, with disagreements between neighbors in the network resolved either through one imitating the opinion of the other or by reassignment…

A most debated topic of the last years is whether simple statistical physics models can explain collective features of social dynamics. A necessary step in this line of endeavour is to find regularities in data referring to large scale…

We explain the anomaly of election results between large cities and rural areas in terms of urban scaling in the 1948-2016 US elections and in the 2016 EU referendum of the UK. The scaling curves are all universal and depend on a single…

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…

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…