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The character of the time-asymptotic evolution of physical systems can have complex, singular behavior with variation of a system parameter, particularly when chaos is involved. A perturbation of the parameter by a small amount $\epsilon$…
An individual's opinion concerning political bias in the media is shaped by exogenous factors (independent analysis of media outputs) and endogenous factors (social activity, e.g. peer pressure by political allies and opponents in a…
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…
Strategic voting, or manipulation, is the process by which a voter misrepresents his preferences in an attempt to elect an outcome that he considers preferable to the outcome under sincere voting. It is generally agreed that manipulation is…
Recent empirical findings suggest that societies have become more polarized in various countries. That is, the median voter of today represents a smaller fraction of society compared to two decades ago and yet, the mechanisms underlying…
The polarization of political opinions among members of the U.S. legislative chambers measured by their voting records is greater today than it was thirty years ago. Previous research efforts to find causes of such increase have suggested…
The voter model is a toy model of consensus formation based on nearest-neighbor interactions. A voter sits at each vertex in a hypercubic lattice (of dimension $d$) and is in one of two possible opinion states. The opinion state of each…
We define a stochastic reaction-diffusion process that describes a consensus formation in a non-sedentary population. The process is a diffusive version of the Majority Vote model, where the state update follows two stages: in the first…
We find that, in the 21st century, democracy has persistent negative impacts on growth in GDP and night-time light intensity. This finding emerges from five different instrumental variable strategies that account for potential invalidity in…
The cognitive process of opinion formation is often characterized by stubbornness or resistance of agents to changes of opinion. To capture such a feature we introduce a constant latency time in the standard voter model of opinion dynamics:…
Forecasting elections -- a challenging, high-stakes problem -- is the subject of much uncertainty, subjectivity, and media scrutiny. To shed light on this process, we develop a method for forecasting elections from the perspective of…
{\em Distortion} is a well-established notion for quantifying the loss of social welfare that may occur in voting. As voting rules take as input only ordinal information, they are essentially forced to neglect the exact values the agents…
Nowadays there is an increasing interest of physicists in finding regularities related to social phenomena. This interest is clearly motivated by applications that a statistical mechanical description of the human behavior may have in our…
Taking a pragmatic approach to the processes involved in the phenomena of collective opinion formation, we investigate two specific modifications to the co-evolving network voter model of opinion formation, studied by Holme and Newman [1].…
Opinion dynamics concerns social processes through which populations or groups of individuals agree or disagree on specific issues. As such, modelling opinion dynamics represents an important research area that has been progressively…
Among different aspects of social networks, dynamics have been proposed to simulate how opinions can be transmitted. In this study, we propose a model that simulates the communication in an online social network, in which the posts are…
We study the opinion dynamics in a generalized voter model in which voters are additionally influenced by two antagonistic news sources, whose effect is to promote political polarization. We show that, as the influence of the news sources…
The concept and technics of real space renormalization group are applied to study majority rule voting in hierarchical structures. It is found that democratic voting can lead to totalitarianism by keeping in power a small minority.…
This work demonstrates that repeated weak measurements together with post-selection can produce sharp dynamical discontinuities in meter observables, even in minimal quantum systems. The discontinuous behavior is governed by the polar angle…
We introduce the confident voter model, in which each voter can be in one of two opinions and can additionally have two levels of commitment to an opinion --- confident and unsure. Upon interacting with an agent of a different opinion, a…