Related papers: Measure and collapse of participatory democracy in…
A critical issue for society today is the emergence and decline of democracy worldwide. It is unclear, however, how democratic features, such as elections and civil liberties, influence this change. Democracy indices, which are the standard…
Despite many examples to the contrary, most models of elections assume that rules determining the winner will be followed. We present a model where elections are solely a public signal of the incumbent popularity, and citizens can protests…
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…
In this communication, we propose a tentative to set the fundamental problem of measuring process done by a large structure on a microsopic one. We consider the example of voting when an entire society tries to measure globally opinions of…
Many organizations describe their processes as consensus-driven, but there is no consensus on the definition of consensus. Qualitative definitions of consensus prioritize social phenomena like "unity" that are not necessarily measurable.…
We propose an exactly solvable model for the dynamics of voters in a two-party system. The opinion formation process is modeled on a random network of agents. The dynamical nature of interpersonal relations is also reflected in the model,…
Direct democracy is a special case of an ensemble of classifiers, where every person (classifier) votes on every issue. This fails when the average voter competence (classifier accuracy) falls below 50%, which can happen in noisy settings…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
Elections for public offices in democratic nations are large-scale examples of collective decision-making. As a complex system with a multitude of interactions among agents, we can anticipate that universal macroscopic patterns could emerge…
We construct a majority cellular automata based model to explain the power-law signatures in Indonesian general election results. The understanding of second-order phase transitions between two different conditions inspires the model. The…
Like many other voting systems, Majority Judgement suffers from the weaknesses of the underlying mathematical model: Elections as problem of choice or ranking. We show how the model can be enhanced to take into account the complete process…
Democracy in a state is possibly a gain to have the government that represents the whole citizens. But the main element of the democratic system is the ability of the governmental functions in the state to act properly in order to gain the…
Voting methods are instrumental design elements of democracies. Citizens use them to express and aggregate their preferences to reach a collective decision. However, voting outcomes can be as sensitive to voting rules as they are to…
In linear models of consensus dynamics, the state of the various agents converges to a value which is a convex combination of the agents' initial states. We call it democratic if in the large scale limit (number of agents going to infinity)…
Political fragmentation denotes the differentiation of a political system into multiple groups and the extent of separation among them. It often manifests structurally in online interaction behaviors. To measure and compare political…
Democracy often fails to meet its ideals, and these failures may be made worse by electoral institutions. Unwanted outcomes include polarized institutions, unresponsive representatives, and the ability of a faction of voters to gain power…
Participatory budgeting is a democratic approach to deciding the funding of public projects, which has been adopted in many cities across the world. We present a survey of research on participatory budgeting emerging from the computational…
We analyse optimal voting weights in two-tier voting systems. In our model, the overall population (or union) is split in groups (or member states) of different sizes. The individuals comprising the overall population constitute the first…
The challenge of understanding the collective behaviors of social systems can benefit from methods and concepts from physics [1-6], not because humans are similar to electrons, but because certain large-scale behaviors can be understood…
We present an alternative voting system that aims at bridging the gap between proportional representative systems and majoritarian, single winner election systems. The system lets people vote for multiple parties, but then assigns each…