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A new model for the dynamics of opinion formation is proposed and analysed at the mean-field level. It can be regarded as a generalization of the noisy voter model in which agents update their binary states by copying others and by an…
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…
We consider the dynamics of the voter model and of the monomer-monomer catalytic process in the presence of many ``competing'' inhomogeneities and show, through exact calculations and numerical simulations, that their presence results in a…
Direct democracy is a special case of an ensemble of classifiers, where every person (classifier) votes on every issue. This fails when the average voter competence (classifier accuracy) falls below 50%, which can happen in noisy settings…
We consider the notions of agreement, diversity, and polarization in ordinal elections (that is, in elections where voters rank the candidates). While (computational) social choice offers good measures of agreement between the voters, such…
Divided Government is nowadays a common feature of the U.S. political system. The voters can cast partisan ballots for two political powers the executive (Presidential elections) and the legislative (the Congress election). Some recent…
The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities -- the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics -- has been a focus of interest for…
We examine kinetic symmetry breaking phenomena in an evolutionary political game in which voters, inhabiting a multidimensional ideological space, cast ballots via selection mechanisms subject to the competing forces of conformity and…
Inspired by the spread of discontent as in the 2016 presidential election, we consider a voter model in which 0's are ordinary voters and 1's are zealots. Thinking of a social network, but desiring the simplicity of an infinite object that…
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…
We study how motivated reasoning affects the provision of climate policy in an electoral competition framework. Voters experience anticipatory disutility when future outcomes appear grim and may therefore distort beliefs in response to…
The Hotelling-Downs model considers parties changing policy to maximise their vote-share. Where policy position lies on a left-right axis, it describes a tendency for political parties to move towards centrist platforms. This is in contrast…
A contrarian is someone who deliberately decides to oppoe the prevailing choice of others. The Galam model of two state opinion dynamicsincorporates agent updates by a single step random grouping in which all participants adopt the opinion…
We investigate how crises alter societies by analyzing the timing and channels of change using a longitudinal multi-wave survey of a representative sample of Americans throughout 2020. This methodology allows us to overcome some of the…
Social influence profoundly impacts individual choices and collective behaviors in politics. In this work, driven by the goal of protecting elections from improper influence, we consider the following scenario: an individual, who has vested…
Opinion dynamics of a group of individuals is the change in the members' opinions through mutual interaction with each other. The related literature contains works in which the dynamics is modeled as a continuous system, of which behavioral…
Politically divided societies are also often divided emotionally: people like and trust those with similar political views (in-group favoritism) while disliking and distrusting those with different views (out-group animosity). This…
The study of complex political phenomena such as parties' polarization calls for mathematical models of political systems. In this paper, we aim at modeling the time evolution of a political system whereby various parties selfishly interact…
In traditional voter models, opinion dynamics are driven by interactions between individuals, where an individual adopts the opinion of a randomly chosen neighbor. However, these models often fail to capture the emergence of entirely new…
The influence of contrarians on the noisy voter model is studied at the mean-field level. The noisy voter model is a variant of the voter model where agents can adopt two opinions, optimistic or pessimistic, and can change them by means of…