Related papers: Persistence in voting behavior: stronghold dynamic…
We generalize the classic multi-agent DeGroot model for opinion dynamics to incorporate the Spiral of Silence theory from political science. This theory states that individuals may withhold their opinions when they perceive them to be in…
We study opinion dynamics in a social network with stubborn agents who influence their neighbors but who themselves always stick to their initial opinion. We consider first the well-known DeGroot model. While it is known in the literature…
Recent technological changes have increased connectivity between individuals around the world leading to higher frequency interactions between members of communities that would be otherwise distant and disconnected. This paper examines a…
Belief perseverance is the widely documented tendency of holding to a belief, even in the presence of contradicting evidence. In online environments, this tendency leads to heated arguments with users ``blocking'' each other. Introducing…
The question of how people vote strategically under uncertainty has attracted much attention in several disciplines. Theoretical decision models have been proposed which vary in their assumptions on the sophistication of the voters and on…
Criteria for a good voting system have been given particularly careful scrutiny in recent years, with general agreement that the core values are fair results, voter power and choice, and local representation. This paper reexamines the basic…
One of the fundamental structural properties of many networks is triangle closure. Whereas the influence of this transitivity on a variety of contagion dynamics has been previously explored, existing models of coevolving or adaptive network…
We introduce a general contagion-like model for competing opinions that includes dynamic resistance to alternative opinions. We show that this model can describe candidate vote distributions, spatial vote correlations, and a slow approach…
Elections, the cornerstone of democratic societies, are usually regarded as unpredictable due to the complex interactions that shape them at different levels. In this work, we show that voter turnouts contain crucial information that can be…
The cognitive process of opinion formation is often characterized by stubbornness or resistance of agents to changes of opinion. To capture such a feature we introduce a constant latency time in the standard voter model of opinion dynamics:…
The diffusion of opinions in Social Networks is a relevant process for adopting positions and attracting potential voters in political campaigns. Opinion polarization, bias, targeted diffusion, and the radicalization of postures are key…
Consideration was given to a model of social dynamics controlled by successive collective decisions based on the threshold majority procedures. The current system state is characterized by the vector of participants' capitals (utilities).…
Estimating effects of spatially structured exposures is complicated by unmeasured spatial confounders, which undermine identifiability in spatial linear regression models unless structural assumptions are imposed. We develop a general…
We introduce the Multiscale Voter Model (MVM) to investigate clan influence at multiple scale -- family, neighborhood, political party... -- in opinion formation on real complex networks. Clans, consisting of similar nodes, are constructed…
Social mobilization often fails not for a lack of collective interest, but because of fierce competition between rival movements for the same limited pool of participants. We generalize the classic threshold model of collective behavior to…
A long line of work in social psychology has studied variations in people's susceptibility to persuasion -- the extent to which they are willing to modify their opinions on a topic. This body of literature suggests an interesting…
There is a deep connection between the ground states of transverse-field spin systems and the late-time distributions of evolving viral populations -- within simple models, both are obtained from the principal eigenvector of the same…
We investigate the dynamics of the voter model in which the population itself changes endogenously via the birth-death process. There are two species of voters, labeled A and B, and the population of each species can grow or shrink by the…
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…
This paper proposes normative criteria for voting rules under uncertainty about individual preferences. The criteria emphasize the importance of responsiveness, i.e., the probability that the social outcome coincides with the realized…