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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…
We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…
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…
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…
Many democratic societies have become more politically polarized, with the U.S. as the main example. The origins of this phenomenon are still not well-understood and subject to debate. To better understand the mechanisms underlying…
The colloquial phrase "partisan bias" encompasses multiple distinct conceptions of bias, including partisan advantage, packing & cracking, and partisan symmetry. All are useful and have their place, and there are several proposed measures…
We study a binary dynamical process that is a representation of the voter model with opinion makers. The process models an election with two candidates but can also describe the frequencies of a biallelic gene in a population or atoms with…
Social physics is the application of ideas, concepts and tools from physics to study social phenomena. In this article, we present a mechanical theory underlying a mathematical treatment of social physics. We explore the possibility of…
The goal of this paper is to estimate some parameters of simple social harmonic oscillations modelling U.S. Presidential Approval and Macropartisanship. The harmonic oscillations are simplest solutions of equations of the deterministic…
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…
We study an opinion dynamics model that explores the competition between persuasion and compromise in a population of agents with nearest-neighbor interactions on a two-dimensional square lattice. Each agent can hold either a positive or a…
Political moderation, a key attractor in democratic systems, proves highly fragile under realistic information conditions. We develop a stochastic model of opinion dynamics to analyze how noise and differential susceptibility reshape the…
While we typically focus on data visualization as a tool for facilitating cognitive tasks (e.g., learning facts, making decisions), we know relatively little about their second-order impacts on our opinions, attitudes, and values. For…
To many statisticians and citizens, the outcome of the most recent U.S. presidential election represents a failure of data-driven methods on the grandest scale. This impression has led to much debate and discussion about how the election…
In this paper we extend some recent results on an operatorial approach to the description of alliances between political parties interacting among themselves and with a basin of electors. In particular, we propose and compare three…
Opinions are an integral part of how we perceive the world and each other. They shape collective action, playing a role in democratic processes, the evolution of norms, and cultural change. For decades, researchers in the social and natural…
Complex dynamical systems driven by the unravelling of information can be modelled effectively by treating the underlying flow of information as the model input. Complicated dynamical behaviour of the system is then derived as an output.…
In certain parliamentary democracies, there are two major parties that move in and out of power every few elections, and a third minority party that essentially never governs. We present a simple model to account for this phenomenon, in…
We propose an exactly solvable model for the dynamics of voters in a two-party system. The opinion formation process is modeled on a random network of agents. The dynamical nature of interpersonal relations is also reflected in the model,…
In recent years, opinion dynamics has received an increasing attention, and various models have been introduced and evaluated mainly by simulation. In this study, we introduce and study a dynamical model inspired by the so-called `bounded…