Related papers: An Economic Topology of the Brexit vote
This work is produced by researchers at the Neuropolitics Research Lab, School of Social and Political Science and the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. In this report we provide an analysis of the social media posts on…
Finance is heavily influenced by data-driven decision-making. Meanwhile, our ability to comprehend the full informational content of data sets remains impeded by the tools we apply in analysis, especially where the data is high-dimensional.…
Decision procedures aggregating the preferences of multiple agents can produce cycles and hence outcomes which have been described heuristically as `chaotic'. We make this description precise by constructing an explicit dynamical system…
I propose an open dataset of country-level historical opinion polling data for the European Union and the UK. The dataset aims to fill a gap in available opinion polling data for the European Union. Some existing datasets are restricted to…
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
This study is a first, exploratory attempt to use quantitative semantics techniques and topological analysis to analyze systemic patterns arising in a complex political system. In particular, we use a rich data set covering all speeches and…
Political polarisation on structured discussion platforms such as Reddit differs fundamentally from that on broadcast platforms such as Twitter/X, yet most prior work targets the latter. We present an end-to-end framework for measuring and…
Brexit, a global pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and record inflation - few legislative bodies have faced such a cascade of shocks as the European Parliament did during its 9th term (2019-2024). Using the Bipartite Configuration…
This study explores the geographic dependencies of echo-chamber communication on Twitter during the Brexit referendum campaign. We review the literature on filter bubbles, echo chambers, and polarization to test five hypotheses positing…
Formation of consensus, in binary yes/no type of voting, is a well defined process. However, even in presence of clear incentives, the dynamics involved can be incredibly complex. Specifically, formations of large groups of similarly…
We applied the Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette (JLS) model to detect possible bubbles and crashes related to the Brexit/Bremain referendum scheduled for 23rd June 2016. Our implementation includes an enhanced model calibration using Genetic…
We perform stochastic microsimulations of the dynamics of England and Wales population after the British referendum on EU membership, considering different possible outcomes. Employing available survey data, we model the demographics of the…
Interest has grown around the classification of stance that users assume within online debates in recent years. Stance has been usually addressed by considering users posts in isolation, while social studies highlight that social…
Empirical analyses on the factors driving vote switching are rare, usually conducted at the national level without considering the parties of origin and destination, and often unreliable due to the severe inaccuracy of recall survey data.…
We analyse the structure and behaviour of a specific voting network using a dynamic structure-based methodology which draws on Q-Analysis and social network theory. Our empirical focus is on the Eurovision Song Contest over a period of 20…
In 2016, United Kingdom (UK) citizens voted to leave the European Union (EU), which was officially implemented in 2020. During this period, UK residents experienced a great deal of uncertainty around the UK's continued relationship with the…
Human dynamics and sociophysics suggest statistical models that may explain and provide us with better insight into social phenomena. Contextual and selection effects tend to produce extreme values in the tails of rank-ordered distributions…
In a signed graph, each link is labeled with either a positive or a negative sign. This is particularly appropriate to model polarized systems. Such a graph can be characterized through the notion of structural balance, which relies on the…
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…
Hashtag data are common and easy to acquire. Thus, they are widely used in studies and visual data storytelling. For example, a recent story by China Central Television Europe (CCTV Europe) depicts Brexit as a hashtag movement displayed on…