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This study examines the relationship between ambiguity and the ideological positioning of political parties across the political spectrum. We identify a strong non-monotonic (inverted U-shaped) relationship between party ideology and…

We study the contrarian voter model for opinion formation in a society under the influence of an external oscillating propaganda and stochastic noise. Each agent of the population can hold one of two possible opinions on a given issue…

The rebellious voter model, introduced by Sturm and Swart (2008), is a variation of the standard, one-dimensional voter model, in which types that are locally in the minority have an advantage. It is related, both through duality and…

With historic misses in the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential elections, interest in measuring polling errors has increased. The most common method for measuring directional errors and non-sampling excess variability during a postmortem for an…

It is well known, by the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem, that when there are more than two candidates, any non-dictatorial voting rule can be manipulated by untruthful voters. But how strong is the incentive to manipulate under different…

Recently, scholars from law and political science have introduced metrics which use only election outcomes (and not district geometry) to assess the presence of partisan gerrymandering. The most high-profile example of such a tool is the…

Using the recently introduced declination function, we estimate the net number of seats won in the US House of Representatives due to asymmetries in vote distributions. Such asymmetries can arise from combinations of partisan gerrymandering…

The Trump phenomenon is argued to depart from current populist rise in Europe. According to a model of opinion dynamics from sociophysics the machinery of Trump's amazing success obeys well-defined counter-intuitive rules. Therefore, his…

We focus on a generalization of the classic Minisum approval voting rule, introduced by Barrot and Lang (2016), and referred to as Conditional Minisum (CMS), for multi-issue elections with preferential dependencies. Under this rule, voters…

In an election, we are given a set of voters, each having a preference list over a set of candidates, that are distributed on a social network. We consider a scenario where voters may change their preference lists as a consequence of the…

The election control problem through social influence asks to find a set of nodes in a social network of voters to be the starters of a political campaign aiming at supporting a given target candidate. Voters reached by the campaign change…

The Bradley effect concerns the discrepancy between opinion polls and actual election outcomes that emerges when candidates do not exhibit ideological, sexual or racial mainstream features. This effect was first observed during the 1982…

Many applications, such as content moderation and recommendation, require reviewing and scoring a large number of alternatives. Doing so robustly is however very challenging. Indeed, voters' inputs are inevitably sparse: most alternatives…

Opinion formation is a process with strong implications for public policy. In controversial debates with large consequences, the public opinion is often trapped in a fifty-fifty stalemate, jeopardizing broadly accepted political decisions.…

Election control considers the problem of an adversary who attempts to tamper with a voting process, in order to either ensure that their favored candidate wins (constructive control) or another candidate loses (destructive control). As…

For centuries, it has been widely believed that the influence of a small coalition of voters is negligible in a large election. Consequently, there is a large body of literature on characterizing the likelihood for an election to be…

There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…

We introduce time variation in the flip-rates of the Voter Model. This type of generalisation is relevant to models of ageing in language change, allowing the representation of changes in speakers' learning rates over their lifetime and may…

We study single-candidate voting embedded in a metric space, where both voters and candidates are points in the space, and the distances between voters and candidates specify the voters' preferences over candidates. In the voting, each…

By classic results in social choice theory, any reasonable preferential voting method sometimes gives individuals an incentive to report an insincere preference. The extent to which different voting methods are more or less resistant to…