Related papers: What did the 2016 Brexit referendum data really sa…
This paper introduces a new factor contributing to the decline in marriage and fertility: the growth of leisure technology. Over recent decades, high-income countries have experienced two notable shifts in household and family dynamics.…
We have considered the statistical distributions of the volumes of the different products exported by 148 countries. We have found that the form of these distributions is not unique but heavily depends on the level of development of the…
Measuring culture and its dynamics through surveys has important limitations, but the emerging field of computational social science allows us to overcome them by analyzing large-scale datasets. In this article, we study cultural dynamics…
The population and housing census 2011 was an EU-wide census in all EU member states. In Germany, the basis was a largely register-based method. In this paper, it is shown that communities with less than 10.000 inhabitants have…
We present a large-scale computational analysis of migration-related discourse in UK parliamentary debates spanning over 75 years and compare it with US congressional discourse. Using open-weight LLMs, we annotate each statement with…
We show the recovery in consumer spending in the United Kingdom through the second half of 2020 is unevenly distributed across regions. We utilise Fable Data: a real-time source of consumption data that is a highly correlated, leading…
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…
Sports betting markets have grown very rapidly recently, with the total European gambling market worth 98.6 billion euro in 2019. Considering a high-resolution (1 Hz) data set provided by a large European bookmaker, we investigate the…
In the 21st century ongoing rapid urbanization highlights the need to gain deeper insights into the social structure of cities. While work on this challenge can profit from abundant data sources, the complexity of this data itself proves to…
For many European countries, in 2015 the refugee situation developed from a remote tragedy reported upon in the news to a situation they have to deal with in their own neighborhood. Driven by this observation, we investigated the…
How do European publics debate a geopolitical crisis on social media, and do they inhabit a shared informational reality? We analyze over 38 million geolocated tweets from 20 European countries during the first eight months of the Russian…
The increasing cost of electoral campaigns raises the need for effective campaign planning and a precise understanding of the return of such investment. Interestingly, despite the strong impact of elections on our daily lives, how this…
This is a report, where preliminary work regarding the topic of voting intention inference from Social Media - such as Twitter - is presented. Our case study is the UK 2010 General Election and we are focusing on predicting the percentages…
Country instability is a global issue, with unpredictably high levels of instability thwarting socio-economic growth and possibly causing a slew of negative consequences. As a result, uncertainty prediction models for a country are becoming…
Human dynamics and sociophysics build on statistical models that can shed light on and add to our understanding of social phenomena. We propose a generative model based on a stochastic differential equation that enables us to model the…
We study individuals' willingness to engage with others who hold opposite views on polarizing policies. A representative sample of 2,507 Americans are given the opportunity to listen to recordings of fellow countrymen and women expressing…
The Eurovision Song Contest is a popular annual international song competition organized by the European Broadcasting Union. The winner is decided by the audience and expert juries from each participating nation, which is why the analysis…
We introduce the confident voter model, in which each voter can be in one of two opinions and can additionally have two levels of commitment to an opinion --- confident and unsure. Upon interacting with an agent of a different opinion, a…
This paper investigates how political campaigns engaged UK football fan communities on Twitter in the aftermath of the Brexit Referendum (2016-2017). Football fandom, with its strong collective identities and tribal behaviours, offers…
Using an analog of the boundary element method in engineering and science, we analyze and model unemployment rate in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States as a function of inflation and the change in…