Related papers: The Trump phenomenon, an explanation from sociophy…
This paper predicting Trump victory has been submitted before the election and revised after, allowing to add a Foreword and Note Added in Revision to discuss in details the causes of the failure of the prediction. In 2016, Trump was…
A universal formula is shown to predict the dynamics of public opinion including eventual sudden and unexpected outbreaks of minority opinions within a generic parameter space of five dimensions. The formula is obtained combining and…
Donald Trump was lagging behind in nearly all opinion polls leading up to the 2016 US presidential election, but he surprisingly won the election. This raises the following important questions: 1) why most opinion polls were not accurate in…
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…
Measuring and forecasting opinion trends from real-time social media is a long-standing goal of big-data analytics. Despite its importance, there has been no conclusive scientific evidence so far that social media activity can capture the…
At the tipping point, it is known that small incident can trigger dramatic societal shift. Getting early-warning signals for such changes are valuable to avoid detrimental outcomes such as riots or collapses of nations. However, it is…
Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a…
Polls posted on social media have emerged in recent years as an important tool for estimating public opinion, e.g., to gauge public support for business decisions and political candidates in national elections. Here, we examine nearly two…
Opinion dynamics, the study of how individual beliefs and collective public opinion evolve, is a fertile domain for applying statistical physics to complex social phenomena. Like physical systems, societies exhibit macroscopic regularities…
The outcomes of democratic elections rest on individuals' decision-making that is driven by their varying preferences and beliefs. Individuals may prefer consensus to gridlock, or gridlock to consensus, and information may be fractured via…
A two state model for opinion forming, which has proven heuristic power, is reviewed with a novel emphasis on the existence or absence of a threshold for the dynamics. Monitored by repeated small groups discussions floater agents update…
Accurate modeling of opinion dynamics has the potential to help us understand polarization and what makes effective political discourse possible or impossible. Here, we use physics-based methods to model the evolution of political opinions…
The boundaries between physical and social networks have narrowed with the advent of the Internet and its pervasive platforms. This has given rise to a complex adaptive information ecosystem where individuals and machines compete for…
We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are…
One of the main dimensions characterizing the unfolding of opinion formation processes in social debates is the degree of open-mindedness of the involved population. Opinion dynamic modeling studies have tried to capture such a peculiar…
We study a stochastic model for the diffusion of competing opinions in a population composed of three types of agents: trend-followers, opposers, and indifferent individuals. The decision dynamics are driven by reinforcement mechanisms,…
The median voter theorem has long been the default model of voter behavior and candidate choice. While contemporary work on the distribution of political opinion has emphasized polarization and an increasing gap between the "left" and the…
Social influence profoundly impacts individual choices and collective behaviors in politics. In this work, driven by the goal of protecting elections from improper influence, we consider the following scenario: an individual, who has vested…
In this paper, we propose a framework to infer the topic preferences of Donald Trump's followers on Twitter. We first use latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to derive the weighted mixture of topics for each Trump tweet. Then we use negative…
We study the emergence of support for Donald Trump in Reddit's political discussion. With almost 800k subscribers, "r/The_Donald" is one of the largest communities on Reddit, and one of the main hubs for Trump supporters. It was created in…