Related papers: Polarization and Consensus by Opposing External So…
Two of the main factors shaping an individual's opinion are social coordination and personal preferences, or personal biases. To understand the role of those and that of the topology of the network of interactions, we study an extension of…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
We investigate disagreement and polarization in a social network with two polarizing sources of information. First, we define disagreement and polarization indices in two-party leader-follower models of opinion dynamics. We then give…
The spread of ideas in online social networks is a crucial phenomenon to understand nowadays the proliferation of fake news and their impact in democracies. This makes necessary to use models that mimic the circulation of rumors. The law of…
I examine the mean consensus time (i.e., exit time) of the voter model in the so-called two-clique graph. The two-clique graph is composed of two cliques interconnected by some links and considered as a toy model of networks with community…
Defying the median voter theorem, party polarization has spread globally, especially in the United States. As concerns grow over its risks to democracy, political science has probed its causes, revealing two paradoxes: while polarization…
Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides…
We generalize a binary majority-vote model on adaptive networks to its plurality-vote counterpart and analyze the time scale to consensus when voters are given more than two options. When opinions are uniformly distributed in the population…
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. By being flexible about the location or width of the center, this measure enables the researcher to analyze polarization…
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…
The rise of social media and online social networks has been a disruptive force in society. Opinions are increasingly shaped by interactions on online social media, and social phenomena including disagreement and polarization are now…
Despite their playful purpose social media changed the way users access information, debate, and form their opinions. Recent studies, indeed, showed that users online tend to promote their favored narratives and thus to form polarized…
The proliferation of social media platforms, recommender systems, and their joint societal impacts have prompted significant interest in opinion formation and evolution within social networks. We study how local edge dynamics can drive…
The increasing polarization in democratic societies is an emergent outcome of political opinion dynamics. Yet, the fundamental mechanisms behind the formation of political opinions, from individual beliefs to collective consensus, remain…
Online social networks provide users with unprecedented opportunities to engage with diverse opinions. At the same time, they enable confirmation bias on large scales by empowering individuals to self-select narratives they want to be…
We explore a new mechanism to explain polarization phenomena in opinion dynamics in which agents evaluate alternative views on the basis of the social feedback obtained on expressing them. High support of the favored opinion in the social…
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…
In social networks, it is often of interest to identify the most influential users who can successfully spread information to others. This is particularly important for marketing (e.g., targeting influencers for a marketing campaign) and 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…