Related papers: Surprise in Elections
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
We study an outcome of a vote in a population of voters exposed to an externally applied bias in favour of one of two potential candidates. The population consists of ordinary individuals, that are in majority and tend to align their…
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…
Understanding how to engage users is a critical question in many applications. Previous research has shown that unexpected or astonishing events can attract user attention, leading to positive outcomes such as engagement and learning. In…
In computational social choice, the distortion of a voting rule quantifies the degree to which the rule overcomes limited preference information to select a socially desirable outcome. This concept has been investigated extensively, but…
We explain the anomaly of election results between large cities and rural areas in terms of urban scaling in the 1948-2016 US elections and in the 2016 EU referendum of the UK. The scaling curves are all universal and depend on a single…
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…
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 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…
Population behaviours, such as voting and vaccination, depend on social networks. Social networks can differ depending on behaviour type and are typically hidden. However, we do often have large-scale behavioural data, albeit only snapshots…
We investigate how individuals form expectations about population behavior using statistical inference based on observations of their social relations. Misperceptions about others' connectedness and behavior arise from sampling bias…
Predicting the winner of an election is a favorite problem both for news media pundits and computational social choice theorists. Since it is often infeasible to elicit the preferences of all the voters in a typical prediction scenario, a…
How often will elections end in landslides? What is the probability for a head-to-head race? Analyzing ballot results from several large countries rather anomalous and yet unexplained distributions have been observed. We identify tactical…
The wisdom of the crowd has long become the de facto approach for eliciting information from individuals or experts in order to predict the ground truth. However, classical democratic approaches for aggregating individual \emph{votes} only…
Online data has the potential to transform how researchers and companies produce election forecasts. Social media surveys, online panels and even comments scraped from the internet can offer valuable insights into political preferences.…
Social media platforms allow users to create polls to gather public opinion on diverse topics. However, we know little about what such polls are used for and how reliable they are, especially in significant contexts like elections. Focusing…
In light of the classic impossibility results of Arrow and Gibbard and Satterthwaite regarding voting with ordinal rules, there has been recent interest in characterizing how well common voting rules approximate the social optimum. In order…
Elections, the cornerstone of democratic societies, are usually regarded as unpredictable due to the complex interactions that shape them at different levels. In this work, we show that voter turnouts contain crucial information that can be…
A recently proposed graph-theoretic metric, the influence gap, has shown to be a reliable predictor of the effect of social influence in two-party elections, albeit only tested on regular and scale-free graphs. Here, we investigate whether…
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…