Related papers: Measuring Congressional District Meandering
Many democratic societies use district-based elections, where the region under consideration is geographically divided into districts and a representative is chosen for each district based on the preferences of the electors who reside…
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…
Research on the causes of political polarization points towards multiple drivers of the problem, from social and psychological to economic and technological. However, political institutions stand out, because -- while capable of…
Different models of random walks on the dual graphs of compact urban structures are considered. Analysis of access times between streets helps to detect the city modularity. The statistical mechanics approach to the ensembles of lazy random…
Sampling biases in training data are a major source of algorithmic biases in machine learning systems. Although there are many methods that attempt to mitigate such algorithmic biases during training, the most direct and obvious way is…
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…
We propose a measure of shape which is appropriate for the study of a complicated geometric structure, defined using the topology of neighborhoods of the structure. One aspect of this measure gives a new notion of fractal dimension. We…
Social media, such as blogs, are often seen as democratic entities that allow more voices to be heard than the conventional mass or elite media. Some also feel that social media exhibits a balancing force against the arguably slanted elite…
In the analysis of square contingency tables with ordered categories, it is essential to assess deviations from marginal homogeneity (MH) when marginal equivalency between row and column variables does not hold. Some measures for evaluating…
Cooperation in the form of vote trading, also known as logrolling, is central for law-making processes, shaping the development of democratic societies. Empirical evidence of logrolling is scarce and limited to highly specific situations…
This paper investigates the application of consensus clustering and meta-clustering to the set of all possible partitions of a data set. We show that when using a "complement" of Rand Index as a measure of cluster similarity, the…
In this paper we focus on the tropical convex hull of convex sets and polyhedral complexes. We give a vertex description of the tropical convex hull of a line segment and a ray. %in \RR^{n+1}/\RR\mathbf{1}. Next we show that tropical convex…
There is a tight connection between credit access and voting. We show that uncertainty in access to credit pushes voters toward more conservative candidates in US elections. Using a 1% sample of the US population with valid credit reports,…
How to fairly apportion congressional seats to states has been debated for centuries. We present an alternative perspective on apportionment, centered not on states but "families" of state, sets of states with "divisor-method" quotas with…
Motivated by putting empirical work based on (synthetic) election data on a more solid mathematical basis, we analyze six distances among elections, including, e.g., the challenging-to-compute but very precise swap distance and the distance…
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 study the United States Congress by constructing networks between Members of Congress based on the legislation that they cosponsor. Using the concept of modularity, we identify the community structure of Congressmen, as connected via…
The United States spends more than $1B each year on initiatives such as the American Community Survey (ACS), a labor-intensive door-to-door study that measures statistics relating to race, gender, education, occupation, unemployment, and…
The electoral college of voting system for the US presidential election is analogous to a coarse graining procedure commonly used to study phase transitions in physical systems. In a recent paper, opinion dynamics models manifesting a phase…
We provide mechanisms and new metric distortion bounds for line-up elections. In such elections, a set of $n$ voters, $m$ candidates, and $\ell$ positions are all located in a metric space. The goal is to choose a set of candidates and…