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We study the community structure of networks representing voting on resolutions in the United Nations General Assembly. We construct networks from the voting records of the separate annual sessions between 1946 and 2008 in three different…
Disease outbreaks force the governments to rapid decisions to deal with. However, the rapid stream of decision-making could be costly in terms of the democratic representativeness. The aim of the paper is to investigate the trade-off…
A mathematical model of interacting species filling ecological niches left by the extinction of others is introduced. Species organize themselves into genera of all sizes. The size of a genus on average grows linearly with its age,…
People's perceptions about the size of minority groups in social networks can be biased, often showing systematic over- or underestimation. These social perception biases are often attributed to biased cognitive or motivational processes.…
Nature provides us with abundant examples of how large numbers of individuals can make decisions without the coordination of a central authority. Social insects, birds, fishes, and many other living collectives, rely on simple interaction…
An important question in representative democracies is how to determine the optimal parliament size of a given country. According to an old conjecture, known as the cubic root law, there is a fairly universal power-law relation, with an…
For centuries, it has been widely believed that the influence of a small coalition of voters is negligible in a large election. Consequently, there is a large body of literature on characterizing the likelihood for an election to be…
Mass Media outlets have occupied the central role of the political scenario, and are persuasive in the process of opinion formation of the citizens. In particular, the study of the relationship between Mass Media and behaviour of citizens…
Citizens' assemblies need to represent subpopulations according to their proportions in the general population. These large committees are often constructed in an online fashion by contacting people, asking for the demographic features of…
Social choice is replete with various settings including single-winner voting, multi-winner voting, probabilistic voting, multiple referenda, and public decision making. We study a general model of social choice called Sub-Committee Voting…
In this paper, we reconsider the spin model suggested recently to understand some features of collective decision making among higher organisms [A.T. Hartnett et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 116 (2016) 038701]. Within the model, the state of an…
The strategic behaviour of pedestrians is largely determined by how they perceive and react to neighbouring people. This issue is addressed in this paper by a model which combines, in a time and space-dependent way, discrete and continuous…
The voter model is an archetypal stochastic process that represents opinion dynamics. In each update, one agent is chosen uniformly at random. The selected agent then copies the current opinion of a randomly selected neighbour. We…
We introduce and solve a model that mimics the herding effect in financial markets when groups of agents share information. The number of agents in the model is growing and at each time step either (i) with probability $p$ an incoming agent…
The wisdom of crowds is an umbrella term for phenomena suggesting that the collective judgment or decision of a large group can be more accurate than the individual judgments or decisions of the group members. A well-known example…
We consider a voting model, where a number of candidates need to be selected subject to certain feasibility constraints. The model generalises committee elections (where there is a single constraint on the number of candidates that need to…
We consider the Majority Vote model coupled with scale-free networks. Recent works point to a non-universal behavior of the Majority Vote model, where the critical exponents depend on the connectivity while the network's effective dimension…
We consider a network of interacting agents and we model the process of choice on the adoption of a given innovative product by means of statistical-mechanics tools. The modelization allows us to focus on the effects of direct interactions…
Citizens' assemblies are an increasingly influential form of deliberative democracy, where randomly selected people discuss policy questions. The legitimacy of these assemblies hinges on their representation of the broader population, but…
Quantifying the spatial organization of human settlements is fundamental to understanding the complexity of urban systems. However, the quantitative patterns of the distribution of villages, towns, and cities that lie between random and…