Related papers: Negative Representation and Instability in Democra…
Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so (Galileo Galilei). According to the above sentence we do not ask why we need to measure democracy but if it is possible to measure something which is not unequivocally defined.…
A national voting population, when segmented into groups like, for example, different states, can yield a counter-intuitive scenario where the winner may not necessarily get the most number of total votes. A recent example is the 2016…
Democratic societies are built around the principle of free and fair elections, that each citizen's vote should count equal. National elections can be regarded as large-scale social experiments, where people are grouped into usually large…
As the world's democratic institutions are challenged by dissatisfied citizens, political scientists and also computer scientists have proposed and analyzed various (innovative) methods to select representative bodies, a crucial task in…
This study investigates adversarial attacks conducted to distort voter model dynamics in complex networks. Specifically, a simple adversarial attack method is proposed to hold the state of opinions of an individual closer to the target…
The stability of a leadership against a growing internal opposition is studied in bottom-up hierarchical organizations. Using a very simple model with bottom-up majority rule voting, the dynamics of power distribution at the various…
We study an influence network of voters subjected to correlated disordered external perturbations, and solve the dynamical equations exactly for fully connected networks. The model has a critical phase transition between disordered unimodal…
The kinetic exchange opinion model shows a well-studied order disorder transition as the noise parameter, representing discord between interacting agents, is increased. A further increase in the noise drives the model, in low dimensions, to…
A key promise of democratic voting is that, by accounting for all constituents' preferences, it produces decisions that benefit the constituency overall. It is alarming, then, that all deterministic voting rules have unbounded distortion:…
Coalitional manipulation in voting is considered to be any scenario in which a group of voters decide to misrepresent their vote in order to secure an outcome they all prefer to the first outcome of the election when they vote honestly. The…
We consider a system in which a group of agents represented by the vertices of a graph synchronously update their opinion based on that of their neighbours. If each agent adopts a positive opinion if and only if that opinion is sufficiently…
For the voter model, we study the effect of a memory-dependent transition rate. We assume that the transition of a spin into the opposite state decreases with the time it has been in its current state. Counter-intuitively, we find that the…
Extreme polarization can undermine democracy by making compromise impossible and transforming politics into a zero-sum game. Ideological polarization - the extent to which political views are widely dispersed - is already strong among…
Liquid democracy is the principle of making collective decisions by letting agents transitively delegate their votes. Despite its significant appeal, it has become apparent that a weakness of liquid democracy is that a small subset of…
We propose a framework for strategic voting when a voter may lack knowledge about the preferences of other voters, or about other voters' knowledge about her own preference. In this setting we define notions of manipulation, equilibrium,…
A model of the opinion dynamics underlying the political decision is proposed. The analysis is restricted to a bipolar scheme with a possible third political area. The interaction among voters is local but the final decision strongly…
We introduce the vacillating voter model in which each voter consults two neighbors to decide its state, and changes opinion if it disagrees with either neighbor. This irresolution leads to a global bias toward zero magnetization. In…
Aging is considered as the property of the elements of a system to be less prone to change states as they get older. We incorporate aging into the noisy voter model, a stochastic model in which the agents modify their binary state by means…
Democratic societies increasingly rely on communication networks to aggregate citizen preferences and information, yet these same networks can systematically mislead voters under certain conditions. We introduce an agent-based model that…
Negative probabilities arise primarily in physics, statistical quantum mechanics and quantum computing. Negative probabilities arise as mixing distributions of unobserved latent variables in Bayesian modeling. Our goal is to provide a link…