Related papers: Assessing differences in legislators' revealed pre…
Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…
Politics around the world exhibits increasing polarization, demonstrated in part by rigid voting configurations in institutions like legislatures or courts. A crux of polarization is separation along a unidimensional ideological axis, but…
In this paper we bring to bear some new tools from statistical learning on the analysis of roll call data. We present a new data-driven model for roll call voting that is geometric in nature. We construct the model by adapting the…
We present a new strategic voting model where we use uncertainty representation to model preferences. Specifically, we use probability sets as uncertainty representations, together with lower and upper expected utility gains to take…
With ever-increasing available data, predicting individuals' preferences and helping them locate the most relevant information has become a pressing need. Understanding and predicting preferences is also important from a fundamental point…
We measure polarization in the United States Congress using the network science concept of modularity. Modularity provides a conceptually-clear measure of polarization that reveals both the number of relevant groups and the strength of…
This paper initiates the study of the testable implications of choice data in settings where agents have privacy preferences. We adapt the standard conceptualization of consumer choice theory to a situation where the consumer is aware of,…
Politics and discussion in parliament is likely to be influenced by the party in power and associated election cycles. However, little is known about the extent to which these events affect discussion and how this has changed over time. We…
LLMs are increasingly used to make or support high-stakes decisions under uncertainty, where alignment depends not only on factual accuracy but on how models weigh tradeoffs between different outcomes. We present an empirical pipeline for…
The roll calls of the Italian Parliament in the XVI legislature are studied by employing multidimensional scaling, hierarchical clustering, and network analysis. In order to detect changes in voting behavior, the roll calls have been…
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,…
Is homophily in social and economic networks driven by a taste for homogeneity (preferences) or by a higher probability of meeting individuals with similar attributes (opportunity)? This paper studies identification and estimation of an…
In this article, we consider modeling ranked responses from a heterogeneous population. Specifically, we analyze data from the Eurobarometer 34.1 survey regarding public policy preferences towards drugs, alcohol and AIDS. Such policy…
The related concepts of partisan belief systems, issue alignment, and partisan sorting are central to our understanding of politics. These phenomena have been studied using measures of alignment between pairs of topics, or how much…
A common approach when studying the quality of representation involves comparing the latent preferences of voters and legislators, commonly obtained by fitting an item-response theory (IRT) model to a common set of stimuli. Despite being…
Within an agent-based model where moral classifications are socially learned, we ask if a population of agents behaves in a way that may be compared with conservative or liberal positions in the real political spectrum. We assume that…
Two of the main factors shaping an individual's opinion are social coordination and personal preferences, or personal biases. To understand the role of those and that of the topology of the network of interactions, we study an extension of…
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…
Understanding politics is challenging because the politics take the influence from everything. Even we limit ourselves to the political context in the legislative processes; we need a better understanding of latent factors, such as…
This paper combines two significant areas of political science research: measuring individual ideological position and cohesion. Although both approaches help analyze legislative behaviors, no unified model currently integrates these…