Related papers: What did the 2016 Brexit referendum data really sa…
Our internal experience of time reflects what is going in the world around us. Our body's natural rhythms get disrupted for a variety of external factors, including exposure to collective events. We collect readings of steps, sleep, and…
Nowadays users get informed and shape their opinion through social media. However, the disintermediated access to contents does not guarantee quality of information. Selective exposure and confirmation bias, indeed, have been shown to play…
The Council of the European Union (EU) is one of the main decision-making bodies of the EU. A number of decisions require a qualified majority, the support of 55% of the member states (currently 15) that represent at least 65% of the total…
Bots are social media accounts that automate interaction with other users, and they are active on the StrongerIn-Brexit conversation happening over Twitter. These automated scripts generate content through these platforms and then interact…
With a majority of 'Yes' votes in the Constitutional Referendum of 2017, Turkey continues its transition from democracy to autocracy. By the will of the Turkish people, this referendum transferred practically all executive power to…
We study some problems of collective choice when individuals can have expressive preferences, that is, where a decision-maker may care not only about the material benefit from choosing an action but also about some intrinsic morality of the…
In a review into automated and malicious activity Twitter released a list of accounts that they believed were connected to state sponsored manipulation of the 2016 American Election. This list details 2,752 accounts Twitter believed to be…
We explain the anomaly of election results between large cities and rural areas in terms of urban scaling in the 1948-2016 US elections and in the 2016 EU referendum of the UK. The scaling curves are all universal and depend on a single…
Human dynamics and sociophysics suggest statistical models that may explain and provide us with better insight into social phenomena. Contextual and selection effects tend to produce extreme values in the tails of rank-ordered distributions…
The outcome of the British General Election to be held in just over one week's time is widely regarded as the most difficult in living memory to predict. Current polls suggest that the two main parties are neck and neck but that there will…
We study in details the turnout rate statistics for 77 elections in 11 different countries. We show that the empirical results established in a previous paper for French elections appear to hold much more generally. We find in particular…
Formation of consensus, in binary yes/no type of voting, is a well defined process. However, even in presence of clear incentives, the dynamics involved can be incredibly complex. Specifically, formations of large groups of similarly…
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
This article identifies and characterises political narratives regarding Europe and broadcasted in UK press during 2016 and 2017. A new theoretical and operational framework is proposed for typifying discourse narratives propagated in the…
We extend previous work about general election-related abuse of UK MPs with two new time periods, one in late 2018 and the other in early 2019, allowing previous observations to be extended to new data and the impact of key stages in the UK…
We combine fine-grained spatially referenced census data with the vote outcomes from the 2016 US presidential election. Using this dataset, we perform ecological inference using distribution regression (Flaxman et al, KDD 2015) with a…
Online Social Networks represent a novel opportunity for political campaigns, revolutionising the paradigm of political communication. Nevertheless, many studies uncovered the presence of d/misinformation campaigns or of malicious…
Accounting for undecided and uncertain voters is a challenging issue for predicting election results from public opinion polls. Undecided voters typify the uncertainty of swing voters in polls but are often ignored or allocated to each…
We employ stochastic dynamic microsimulations to analyse and forecast the pension cost dependency ratio for England and Wales from 1991 to 2061, evaluating the impact of the ongoing state pension reforms and changes in international…
Food insecurity is associated with increased risk for several health conditions and with poor chronic disease management. Key determinants for household food insecurity are income and food costs. Whereas short-term household incomes are…