Related papers: Do two parties represent the US? Clustering analys…
We consider a two-round election model involving $m$ voters and $n$ candidates. Each voter is endowed with a strict preference list ranking the candidates. In the first round, the candidates are partitioned into two subsets, $A$ and $B$,…
What does it mean for a clustering to be fair? One popular approach seeks to ensure that each cluster contains groups in (roughly) the same proportion in which they exist in the population. The normative principle at play is balance: any…
The controversies around the 2020 US presidential elections certainly casts serious concerns on the efficiency of the current voting system in representing the people's will. Is the naive Plurality voting suitable in an extremely polarized…
Some argue that political stability is best served through a two-party system. This study refutes this. The author mathematically defines the stability and rigidity of electoral systems comprised of any quantity of electors and parties. In…
Clustering provides a common means of identifying structure in complex data, and there is renewed interest in clustering as a tool for the analysis of large data sets in many fields. A natural question is how many clusters are appropriate…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
We present a Bayesian approach to predict the clustering of opinions for a system of interacting agents from partial observations. The Bayesian formulation overcomes the unobservability of the system and quantifies the uncertainty in the…
The feature-selection problem is formulated from an information-theoretic perspective. We show that the problem can be efficiently solved by an extension of the recently proposed info-clustering paradigm. This reveals the fundamental…
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…
The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum,…
The impact of culture on how people express distress in online support communities is increasingly a topic of interest within Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). In the United States, distinct…
Numerous papers ask how difficult it is to cluster data. We suggest that the more relevant and interesting question is how difficult it is to cluster data sets {\em that can be clustered well}. More generally, despite the ubiquity and the…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
The simplified hypothesis that an election is polarized as an explanation of recent electoral outcomes worldwide is centered on perceptions of voting patterns rather than ideological data from the electorate. While the literature focuses on…
Does polarization online reflect the state of polarization in society? We study ideological positions and attitudes on several issues in France, a country with documented issue nonalignment. We compare distributions on X/Twitter with a…
When confronted with a host of issues, groups often save time and energy by compiling many issues into a single bundle when making decisions. This reduces the time and cost of group decision-making, but it also leads to suboptimal outcomes…
Discussions of political disagreement emphasize two patterns: polarization, where beliefs diverge toward opposite extremes on each issue dimension; and issue alignment, where individuals' views across issues become more internally…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. By being flexible about the location or width of the center, this measure enables the researcher to analyze polarization…
There is growing concern that over the past decade, industrialized democratic nations are becoming increasingly politically polarized. Indeed, elections in the US, UK, France, and Germany have all seen tightly won races, with notable…
We study a model of a population making a binary decision based on information spreading within the population, which is fully connected or covering a square grid. We assume that a fraction of the population wants to make the choice of the…