Related papers: Statistical detection of systematic election irreg…
We consider a setting with agents that have preferences over alternatives and are partitioned into disjoint districts. The goal is to choose one alternative as the winner using a mechanism which first decides a representative alternative…
In this paper, I review the main trends in voting in national elections in Russia since 1991, discuss the evidence of manipulation or falsification by the authorities, and use statistical techniques to examine the determinants of voting…
Statistical hypothesis testing serves as statistical evidence for scientific innovation. However, if the reported results are intentionally biased, hypothesis testing no longer controls the rate of false discovery. In particular, we study…
In an election in which each voter ranks all of the candidates, we consider the head-to-head results between each pair of candidates and form a labeled directed graph, called the margin graph, which contains the margin of victory of each…
Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…
A critical issue for society today is the emergence and decline of democracy worldwide. It is unclear, however, how democratic features, such as elections and civil liberties, influence this change. Democracy indices, which are the standard…
Simulation studies are indispensable for evaluating statistical methods and ubiquitous in statistical research. The most common simulation approach is parametric simulation, where the data-generating mechanism (DGM) corresponds to a…
We provide practical, efficient, and nonparametric methods for auditing the fairness of deployed classification and regression models. Whereas previous work relies on a fixed-sample size, our methods are sequential and allow for the…
We consider a two-round election model involving $m$ voters and $n$ candidates. Each voter is endowed with a strict preference list ranking the candidates. In the first round, the candidates are partitioned into two subsets, $A$ and $B$,…
To many statisticians and citizens, the outcome of the most recent U.S. presidential election represents a failure of data-driven methods on the grandest scale. This impression has led to much debate and discussion about how the election…
The best way to reconcile political actors in a controversial electoral process is a full audit. When this is not possible, statistical tools may be useful for measuring the likelihood of the results. The Venezuelan recall referendum (2004)…
In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…
Social choice theory offers a wealth of approaches for selecting a candidate on behalf of voters based on their reported preference rankings over options. When voters have underlying utilities for these options, however, using preference…
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…
Much research in electoral control -- one of the most studied form of electoral attacks, in which an entity running an election alters the structure of that election to yield a preferred outcome -- has focused on giving decision complexity…
The article contains a methodology for social statistics assessing. The significance of minorities (groups that differ in their attributes from the majority) has grown substantially in the modern postindustrial economy and society. In the…
Many democratic political parties hold primary elections, which nicely reflects their democratic nature and promote, among other things, the democratic value of inclusiveness. However, the methods currently used for holding such primary…
Consider an undirected graph G, representing a social network, where each node is blue or red, corresponding to positive or negative opinion on a topic. In the voter model, in discrete time rounds, each node picks a neighbour uniformly at…
Scoring protocols are a broad class of voting systems. Each is defined by a vector $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2,...,\alpha_m)$, $\alpha_1 \geq \alpha_2 \geq >... \geq \alpha_m$, of integers such that each voter contributes $\alpha_1$ points to…
The question of how people vote strategically under uncertainty has attracted much attention in several disciplines. Theoretical decision models have been proposed which vary in their assumptions on the sophistication of the voters and on…