Related papers: Between order and disorder: a 'weak law' on recent…
Election data represent a precious source of information to study human behavior at a large scale. In proportional elections with open lists, the number of votes received by a candidate, rescaled by the average performance of all…
We study in details the turnout rate statistics for 77 elections in 11 different countries. We show that the empirical results established in a previous paper for French elections appear to hold much more generally. We find in particular…
We report on a statistical analysis of the engagement in the electoral processes of all Brazilian cities by considering the number of party memberships and the number of candidates for mayor and councillor. By investigating the…
Data of proportional elections show a striking feature: If the parties are ranked according to the number of their voters, the number of votes grows exponentially with the rank of the party. This so-called Zipf's law has been reported…
We investigate the time evolution of the density of active links and of the entropy of the distribution of agents among opinions in multi-state voter models with all-to-all interaction and on uncorrelated networks. Individual realisations…
Nowadays there is an increasing interest of physicists in finding regularities related to social phenomena. This interest is clearly motivated by applications that a statistical mechanical description of the human behavior may have in our…
We present a systematic study of Plurality elections with strategic voters who, in addition to having preferences over election winners, have secondary preferences, which govern their behavior when their vote cannot affect the election…
It is well known that no reasonable voting rule is strategyproof. Moreover, the common Plurality rule is particularly prone to strategic behavior of the voters and empirical studies show that people often vote strategically in practice.…
Elections for public offices in democratic nations are large-scale examples of collective decision-making. As a complex system with a multitude of interactions among agents, we can anticipate that universal macroscopic patterns could emerge…
The well-known Condorcet Jury Theorem states that, under majority rule, the better of two alternatives is chosen with probability approaching one as the population grows. We study an asymmetric setting where voters face varying…
We introduce a general methodology of update rules accounting for arbitrary interevent time distributions in simulations of interacting agents. In particular we consider update rules that depend on the state of the agent, so that the update…
Elections, specially in countries such as Brazil with an electorate of the order of 100 million people, yield large-scale data-sets embodying valuable information on the dynamics through which individuals influence each other and make…
The previous twelve turnout rates of French national elections by municipality show regularities. These regularities do not depend on the national turnout level, nor on the nature of the election. Based on past statistical regularities we…
We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interference by third parties. For example, suppose votes have been cast in an election between two candidates, and then each vote is randomly changed with a small…
Voting rules may implement the will of the society when all eligible voters vote, and only them. However, they may fail to do so when sybil (fake or duplicate) votes are present and when only some honest (non sybil) voters actively…
The Council of the European Union (EU) is one of the main decision-making bodies of the EU. A number of decisions require a qualified majority, the support of 55% of the member states (currently 15) that represent at least 65% of the total…
How often will elections end in landslides? What is the probability for a head-to-head race? Analyzing ballot results from several large countries rather anomalous and yet unexplained distributions have been observed. We identify tactical…
Accounting for undecided and uncertain voters is a challenging issue for predicting election results from public opinion polls. Undecided voters typify the uncertainty of swing voters in polls but are often ignored or allocated to each…
Since the 1970s there has been a large number of countries that combine formal democratic institutions with authoritarian practices. Although in such countries the ruling elites may receive considerable voter support they often employ…
Since Downs proposed that the act of voting is irrational in 1957, myriad models have been proposed to explain voting and account for observed turnout patterns. We propose a model in which partisans consider both the instrumental and…