Related papers: The Calculus of Democratization and Development
We employ an agent-based model for cultural dynamics to investigate the effects of spatial heterogeneities on the collective behavior of a social system. We introduce heterogeneity as a random distribution of defects or imperfections in a…
Up-to-date poverty maps are an important tool for policy makers, but until now, have been prohibitively expensive to produce. We propose a generalizable prediction methodology to produce poverty maps at the village level using geospatial…
This article shows how fair voting methods can be a catalyst for change in the way we make collective decisions, and how such change can promote long-awaited upgrades of democracy. Based on real-world evidence from democratic innovations in…
We introduce a non-partisan probability distribution on congressional redistricting of North Carolina which emphasizes the equal partition of the population and the compactness of districts. When random districts are drawn and the results…
Labor productivity in developed countries is analyzed and modeled. Modeling is based on our previous finding that the rate of labor force participation is a unique function of GDP per capita. Therefore, labor productivity is fully…
Deliberative processes are often discussed as increasing or decreasing polarization. This approach misses a different, and arguably more diagnostic, dimension of opinion change: whether deliberation reshuffles who agrees with whom, or…
I overview data on several radical societal changes started circa 2015: accelerated decline in fertility rate, backsliding of democracy, rise of populist politics and arrest in generational renewal of political leadership. I conjecture that…
We have modeled the employment/population ratio in the largest developed countries. Our results show that the evolution of the employment rate since 1970 can be predicted with a high accuracy by a linear dependence on the logarithm of real…
Policy choices in the wake of recent mass protests in Egypt will determine the likelihood of civil war in the short run and the prospects for democracy in the long run. Economic conditions can be improved by international action to reduce…
In an election in which each voter ranks all of the candidates, we consider the head-to-head results between each pair of candidates and form a labeled directed graph, called the margin graph, which contains the margin of victory of each…
Growth rate of real GDP per capita is represented as a sum of two components -- a monotonically decreasing economic trend and fluctuations related to a specific age population change. The economic trend is modeled by an inverse function of…
Within an agent-based model where moral classifications are socially learned, we ask if a population of agents behaves in a way that may be compared with conservative or liberal positions in the real political spectrum. We assume that…
Post-World War II armed conflicts have often been viewed with higher scrutiny in order to avoid a full-scale global war. This scrutiny has led to the establishment of determinants of war such as poverty, inequalities, literacy, and many…
Revolution dynamics is studied through a minimal Ising model with three main influences (fields): personal conservatism (power-law distributed), inter-personal and group pressure, and a global field incorporating peer-to-peer and mass…
The challenge of understanding the collective behaviors of social systems can benefit from methods and concepts from physics [1-6], not because humans are similar to electrons, but because certain large-scale behaviors can be understood…
We test a dynamic ODE model of hierarchical asymmetry on a panel of 260 countries over 1960-2023, drawing on World Bank, Penn World Table, V-Dem and World Inequality Database sources. In cross-section the model holds partially: trade…
This paper proposes a two blocks and three regions economic geography model that can account for the most salient stylized facts experienced by Eastern European transition economies during the period 1990 2005. In contrast to the existing…
This study analyzes the impact of globalization on sustainable development in Turkiye. We used the ARDL method with annual data for the period 2000-2021. Results reveal that economic globalization promotes positively to sustainable…
This paper studies the evolution of the distribution of opinions in a population of individuals in which there exist two distinct subgroups of highly-committed, well-connected opinion leaders endowed with a strong convincing power. Each…
In this paper, we use a variety of machine learning methods to quantify the extent to which economic and technological factors are predictive of the progression of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) within a country, using as our…