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Here we study the emergence of spontaneous leadership in large populations. In standard models of opinion dynamics, herding behavior is only obeyed at the local scale due to the interaction of single agents with their neighbors; while at…
In this work, we investigate interactions that simultaneously order a system locally, while keeping it globally disordered. The study is done in the context of the emergence of diversity in opinion propagation models with interactions…
We explore how the mechanics of collective decision-making, especially of jury deliberation, can be inferred from macroscopic statistics. We first hypothesize that the dynamics of competing opinions can leave a "fingerprint" in the joint…
Migration's impact spans various social dimensions, including demography, sustainability, politics, economy and gender disparities. Yet, the decision-making process behind migrants choosing their destination remains elusive. Existing models…
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,…
Collective leadership and herding may arise in standard models of opinion dynamics as an interplay of a strong separation of time scales within the population and its hierarchical organization. Using the voter model as a simple opinion…
We study the drivers and spatial diffusion of U.S. state population growth using a dynamic spatial model for 49 states, 1965-2017. Methodologically, we recover the spatial network structure from the data, rather than imposing it a priori…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
Competition between varying ideas, people and institutions fuels the dynamics of socio-economic systems. Numerous analyses of the empirical data extracted from different financial markets have established a consistent set of stylized facts…
Influence among individuals is at the core of collective social phenomena such as the dissemination of ideas, beliefs or behaviors, social learning and the diffusion of innovations. Different mechanisms have been proposed to implement…
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…
The voter model is a paradigm of ordering dynamics. At each time step, a random node is selected and copies the state of one of its neighbors. Traditionally, this state has been considered as a binary variable. Here, we relax this…
We experimentally study voter turnout in two-tier elections when the electorate consists of multiple groups, such as states. Votes are aggregated within the groups by the winner-take-all rule or the proportional rule, and the group-level…
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…
In political campaigning substantial resources are spent on voter mobilization, that is, on identifying and influencing as many people as possible to vote. Campaigns use statistical tools for deciding whom to target ("microtargeting"). In…
In traditional voter models, opinion dynamics are driven by interactions between individuals, where an individual adopts the opinion of a randomly chosen neighbor. However, these models often fail to capture the emergence of entirely new…
Uncertainty persists over how and why some countries become democratic and others do not, or why some countries remain democratic and others 'backslide' toward autocracy. Furthermore, while scholars generally agree on the nature of…
Cities are characterized by concentrating population, economic activity and services. However, not all cities are equal and a natural hierarchy at local, regional or global scales spontaneously emerges. In this work, we introduce a method…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…
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…