Related papers: Mining and Analyzing the Italian Parliament: Party…
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…
Understanding and quantifying polarization in social systems is important because of many reasons. It could for instance help to avoid segregation and conflicts in the society or to control polarized debates and predict their outcomes. In…
This paper develops a new model and estimation procedure for panel data that allows us to identify heterogeneous structural breaks. We model individual heterogeneity using a grouped pattern. For each group, we allow common structural breaks…
In a signed graph, each link is labeled with either a positive or a negative sign. This is particularly appropriate to model polarized systems. Such a graph can be characterized through the notion of structural balance, which relies on the…
We propose new methods of electoral statistics. With their help, we study transcripts of vote counting in municipal elections. We construct and apply effective statistical tests to detect the ballot stuffing at the level of individual…
Consider the voter model on a box of side length $L$ (in the triangular lattice) with boundary votes fixed forever as type 0 or type 1 on two different halves of the boundary. Motivated by analogous questions in percolation, we study…
Research on the causes of political polarization points towards multiple drivers of the problem, from social and psychological to economic and technological. However, political institutions stand out, because -- while capable of…
This paper studies the evolution of the distribution of opinions in a population of individuals in which there exist two distinct subgroups of highly-committed, well-connected opinion leaders endowed with a strong convincing power. Each…
Scaling has been proposed as a powerful tool to analyze the properties of complex systems, and in particular for cities where it describes how various properties change with population. The empirical study of scaling on a wide range of…
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…
We propose ClusPath, a novel algorithm for detecting general evolution tendencies in a population of entities. We show how abstract notions, such as the Swedish socio-economical model (in a political dataset) or the companies fiscal…
We analyze the dynamical scaling behavior in a two-dimensional spin model with competing interactions after a quench to a striped phase. We measure the growth exponents studying the scaling of the interfaces and the scaling of the shrinking…
In this paper we present a social network and forensic analysis of the vote counts of Spanish national elections that took place in December 2015 and their sequel in June 2016. Vote counts are extracted at the level of municipalities,…
Modern political interaction is characterized by strong partisanship and a lack of interest in information sharing and agreement across party lines. It remains largely unclear how such partisan echo chambers arise and how they coevolve with…
We propose a method to decompose dynamical systems based on the idea that modules constrain the spread of perturbations. We find partitions of system variables that maximize 'perturbation modularity', defined as the autocovariance of…
The membership of British political parties has a direct influence on their political effectiveness. This paper applies the mathematics of epidemiology to the analysis of the growth and decline of such memberships. The party members are…
Social media platforms have become essential spaces for public discourse. While political polarisation and limited communication across different groups are widely acknowledged, the connection between social network fragmentation and the…
We explore the voter model dynamics on a directed random graph model ensemble (digraphs), given by the Directed Configuration Model. The voter model captures the evolution of opinions over time on a graph where each vertex represents an…
We introduce a dataset on political orientation and power position identification. The dataset is derived from ParlaMint, a set of comparable corpora of transcribed parliamentary speeches from 29 national and regional parliaments. We…
We analyse the structure and behaviour of a specific voting network using a dynamic structure-based methodology which draws on Q-Analysis and social network theory. Our empirical focus is on the Eurovision Song Contest over a period of 20…