Related papers: Persistence in voting behavior: stronghold dynamic…
In traditional voter models, opinion dynamics are driven by interactions between individuals, where an individual adopts the opinion of a randomly chosen neighbor. However, these models often fail to capture the emergence of entirely new…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…
Previous explanations for the persistence of polarization of opinions have typically included modelling assumptions that predispose the possibility of polarization (i.e., assumptions allowing a pair of agents to drift apart in their opinion…
A social system is susceptible to perturbation when its collective properties depend sensitively on a few pivotal components. Using the information geometry of minimal models from statistical physics, we develop an approach to identify…
The existence of juxtaposed regions of distinct cultures in spite of the fact that people's beliefs have a tendency to become more similar to each other's as the individuals interact repeatedly is a puzzling phenomenon in the social…
We consider the Persistent Voter model (PVM), a variant of the Voter model (VM) that includes transient, dynamically-induced zealots. Due to peer reinforcement, the internal confidence $\eta_i$ of a normal voter increases by steps of size…
In this work, we focus on strategies to influence the opinion dynamics of a well-connected society. We propose a generalization of the popular voter model. This variant of the voter model can capture a wide range of individuals including…
In this paper, we extend the voter model (VM) and the threshold voter model (TVM) to include external influences modelled as a jump process. We study the newly-formulated models both analytically and computationally, employing diffusion…
A most debated topic of the last years is whether simple statistical physics models can explain collective features of social dynamics. A necessary step in this line of endeavour is to find regularities in data referring to large scale…
This study demonstrates the persistent dominance of identity based voting across democratic systems, using the United States as a primary case and comparative analyses of 19 other democracies as counterfactuals. Drawing solely on election…
We introduce the threshold $q$-voter opinion dynamics where an agent, facing a binary choice, can change its mind when at least $q_0$ amongst $q$ neighbors share the opposite opinion. Otherwise, the agent can still change its mind with a…
There are many factors that can influence the outcome of an election. We here identify two dominant effects that can affect the votes obtained by a candidate, namely, the Majority Effect and the Media Effect. We mimic these two effects in a…
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…
We introduce the incremental voter model (IVM), a discrete-opinion multi-agent system where agents undergo step-wise transitions biased by the opinion of a randomly selected persuader. Our incremental voter model comprises a large…
Recent analysis of social communications among humans has revealed that the interval between interactions for a pair of individuals and for an individual often follows a long-tail distribution. We investigate the effect of such a…
We introduce the confident voter model, in which each voter can be in one of two opinions and can additionally have two levels of commitment to an opinion --- confident and unsure. Upon interacting with an agent of a different opinion, a…
We study the effect of strategic behavior in iterative voting for multiple issues under uncertainty. We introduce a model synthesizing simultaneous multi-issue voting with Meir, Lev, and Rosenschein (2014)'s local dominance theory and…
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…
The election control problem through social influence asks to find a set of nodes in a social network of voters to be the starters of a political campaign aiming at supporting a given target candidate. Voters reached by the campaign change…
Consider a community where initially, each individual is positive or negative regarding a reform proposal. In each round, individuals gather randomly in fixed rooms of different sizes, and all individuals in a room agree on the majority…