Related papers: Universal size effects for populations in group-ou…
Direct democracy is a special case of an ensemble of classifiers, where every person (classifier) votes on every issue. This fails when the average voter competence (classifier accuracy) falls below 50%, which can happen in noisy settings…
Growth patterns of complex systems predict how they change in sizes, numbers, masses, etc. Understanding growth is important, especially for many biological, ecological, urban, and socioeconomic systems. One noteworthy growth behavior is…
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…
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…
Ethnic-based political inequality is widespread, yet its underlying drivers remain poorly understood. This paper shows that an ethnic group's relative size is a key correlate of its access to central executive power. Using data on 575…
We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are…
Universality in the behavior of complex systems often reveals itself in the form of scale-invariant distributions that are essentially independent of the details of the microscopic dynamics. A representative paradigm of complex behavior in…
We study the role of hierarchical structures in a simple model of collective consensus formation based on the bounded confidence model with continuous individual opinions. For the particular variation of this model considered in this paper,…
We study a model of a population making a binary decision based on information spreading within the population, which is fully connected or covering a square grid. We assume that a fraction of the population wants to make the choice of the…
The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…
Why are online community sizes so extremely unequal? Most answers to this question have pointed to general mathematical processes drawn from physics like cumulative advantage. These explanations provide little insight into specific social…
A cluster theory based mathematical model was developed and used to simulate the dynamics of a system composed of a large number of interacting agents-clusters with different size. The case of a system formed by a constant total number of…
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…
Like many other voting systems, Majority Judgement suffers from the weaknesses of the underlying mathematical model: Elections as problem of choice or ranking. We show how the model can be enhanced to take into account the complete process…
Social dynamics determined by voting in a stochastic environment is analyzed for a society composed of two cohesive groups of similar size. Within the model of random walks determined by voting, explicit formulas are derived for the capital…
We analyze the growth statistics of Swedish trade unions and find a universal functional form for the probability distribution of growth rates of union size, and a power law dependence of the standard deviation of this distribution on the…
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…
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…
Scaling laws are powerful summaries of the variations of urban attributes with city size. However, the validity of their universal meaning for cities is hampered by the observation that different scaling regimes can be encountered for the…
Multi-agent systems of large language models (LLMs) are rapidly expanding across domains, introducing dynamics not captured by single-agent evaluations. Yet, existing work has mostly contrasted the behavior of a single agent with that of a…