Related papers: Integer percentages as electoral falsification fin…
We present a novel model for the effect of echo chambers, filter bubbles, and reinforcement on election results. Our model extends the well known voter model with zealots to include reinforcement. We analyze the behaviour of the model,…
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…
This article deals with some stochastic population protocols, motivated by theoretical aspects of distributed computing. We modelize the problem by a large urn of black and white balls from which at every time unit a fixed number of balls…
We consider manipulation problems when the manipulator only has partial information about the votes of the nonmanipulators. Such partial information is described by an information set, which is the set of profiles of the nonmanipulators…
A local bootstrap method is proposed for the analysis of electoral vote-count first-digit frequencies, complementing the Benford's Law limit. The method is calibrated on five presidential-election first rounds (2002--2006) and applied to…
Proponents of participatory democracy praise Liquid Democracy: decisions are taken by referendum, but voters delegate their votes freely. When better informed voters are present, delegation can increase the probability of a correct…
In collective decision making, where a voting rule is used to take a collective decision among a group of agents, manipulation by one or more agents is usually considered negative behavior to be avoided, or at least to be made…
We focus on the potential fragility of democratic elections given modern information-communication technologies (ICT) in the Web 2.0 era. Our work provides an explanation for the cascading attrition of public officials recently in the…
Opinion polls have now become a very important component of society because they are now a defacto component of our daily news cycle and because their results influence governments and business in ways which are not always obvious to us.…
Quantitative research relies heavily on coding, and coding errors are relatively common even in published research. In this paper, we examine whether individuals are more or less likely to check their code depending on the results they…
This paper focuses on Majority Dynamics in sparse graphs, in particular, as a tool to study internal cuts. It is known that, in Majority Dynamics on a finite graph, each vertex eventually either comes to a fixed state, or oscillates with…
Errors are inevitable in the implementation of any complex process. Here we examine the effect of random errors on Single Transferable Vote (STV) elections, a common approach to deciding multi-seat elections. It is usually expected that…
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
Match-fixing undermines the integrity of sport by eroding public trust and threatening the financial sustainability of clubs and leagues. The global expansion of sports betting markets has created new incentives and opportunities for…
The State and its citizens generate lots of data. Once stored and processed, data can help resolve questions in Social Sciences, where it is common to need data in a different level of aggregation than the data is presented. In election…
We use the ``map of elections'' approach of Szufa et al. (AAMAS-2020) to analyze several well-known vote distributions. For each of them, we give an explicit formula or an efficient algorithm for computing its frequency matrix, which…
In the US 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama was elected as the 44th president of United States, winning the 53% of popular votes and 68% of electoral votes; in the election of 2000, Al Gore lost the election receiving 49 % of…
Voting is a simple mechanism to aggregate the preferences of agents. Many voting rules have been shown to be NP-hard to manipulate. However, a number of recent theoretical results suggest that this complexity may only be in the worst-case…
Regimes routinely conceal acts of repression. We show that observed repression may be negatively correlated with total repression, consisting of both revealed and concealed acts. This distortion can generate perverse effects for policy…
In many proportional parliamentary elections, electoral thresholds (typically 3-5%) are used to promote stability and governability by preventing the election of parties with very small representation. However, these thresholds often result…