Related papers: The Calculus of Democratization and Development
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…
Nowadays there is an increasing interest of physicists in finding regularities related to social phenomena. This interest is clearly motivated by applications that a statistical mechanical description of the human behavior may have in our…
A model of the opinion dynamics underlying the political decision is proposed. The analysis is restricted to a bipolar scheme with a possible third political area. The interaction among voters is local but the final decision strongly…
In this paper the correlation between education, research and macroeconomic strength of countries at a global scale is analyzed on the basis of statistical data published by the UNIDO and OECD. It uses sets of composite indicators…
Ethnic-based political inequality is widespread, yet its underlying drivers remain poorly understood. This paper shows that an ethnic group's relative size is a key correlate of its access to central executive power. Using data on 575…
We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interference by third parties. For example, suppose votes have been cast in an election between two candidates, and then each vote is randomly changed with a small…
In linear models of consensus dynamics, the state of the various agents converges to a value which is a convex combination of the agents' initial states. We call it democratic if in the large scale limit (number of agents going to infinity)…
Classification algorithms are increasingly used in areas such as housing, credit, and law enforcement in order to make decisions affecting peoples' lives. These algorithms can change individual behavior deliberately (a fraud prediction…
This paper presents a semi-quantitative mathematical model of the changes over time in the statistical distribution of well-being of individuals in a society. The model predicts that when individuals overvalue the more socially conspicuous…
We introduce Flexible Representative Democracy (FRD), a novel hybrid of Representative Democracy (RD) and Direct Democracy (DD) in which voters can alter the issue-dependent weights of a set of elected representatives. In line with the…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
Viscous democracy is a generalization of liquid democracy, a social choice framework in which voters may transitively delegate their votes. In viscous democracy, a "viscosity" factor decreases the weight of a delegation the further it…
The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…
This paper examines the relationship between Official Development Assistance (ODA) and conflict in the ten largest aid-receiving African countries between 2009 and 2023. Using Ordinary Least Squares, Principal Component Analysis, and Ridge…
The highly detailed international trade data among all countries in the world during 1971-2000 shows that the kinds of export goods and the logarithmic GDP (gross domestic production) of a country has an S-shaped relationship. This…
In district-based elections, electors cast votes in their respective districts. In each district, the party with maximum votes wins the corresponding seat in the governing body. The election result is based on the number of seats won by…
We here present a model of the dynamics of extremism based on opinion dynamics in order to understand the circumstances which favour its emergence and development in large fractions of the general public. Our model is based on the bounded…
I study the conditions under which a democratic dynamics of a public debate drives a Minority-to-Majority transition. A landscape of the opinion dynamics is thus built using the Galam Majority Model (GMM) in a 3-dimensional parameter space…
Political fragmentation in Africa poses to a significant challenge to effective governance and stability. Traditional measures of party system fragmentation, such as the Effective Number of Parties (ENP) index, often fail to capture the…
Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. The sources of influence can be generally divided into external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An…