Related papers: Ethnic Groups' Access to State Power and Group Siz…

Quantifying the spatial organization of human settlements is fundamental to understanding the complexity of urban systems. However, the quantitative patterns of the distribution of villages, towns, and cities that lie between random and…

An alternative voting scheme is proposed to fill the democratic gap between a president elected democratically via universal suffrage (deterministic outcome, the actual majority decides), and a president elected by one person randomly…

We consider a model of power distribution in a social system where a set of agents play a simple game on a graph: the probability of winning each round is proportional to the agent's current power, and the winner gets more power as a…

The dynamics of casual group formation has long been a subject of interest in social sciences. While early stochastic models offered foundational insights into group size distributions, they often simplified individual behaviors and lacked…

Many large cities are found at locations with certain first nature advantages. Yet, those exogenous locational features may not be the most potent forces governing the spatial pattern of cities. In particular, population size, spacing and…

An explanation for the political processes leading to the sudden collapse of empires and states would be useful for understanding both historical and contemporary political events. We seek a general description of state collapse spanning…

We present an agent-based model of economic exchange in a society composed of two groups, representing two social groups and with different internal protection rules for the poor agents. The goal is to address the emerging wealth…

A longstanding puzzle in urban science is whether there's an intrinsic match between human populations and the mass of their built environments. Previous findings have revealed various urban properties scaling nonlinearly with population,…

Phase transitions, characterized by abrupt shifts between macroscopic patterns of organization, are ubiquitous in complex systems. Despite considerable research in the physical and natural sciences, the empirical study of this phenomenon in…

The process of European integration resulted in a marked increase in transnational economic flows, yet regional inequalities along many developmental indicators remain. We analyze the unevenness of European economies with respect to the…

There are many factors that can influence the outcome of an election. We here identify two dominant effects that can affect the votes obtained by a candidate, namely, the Majority Effect and the Media Effect. We mimic these two effects in a…

Economists, historians, and social scientists have long debated how open-access areas, frontier regions, and customary landholding regimes came to be enclosed or otherwise transformed into private property. This paper analyzes decentralized…

Many people believe that it is disadvantageous for members aligning with a minority party to cluster in cities, as this makes it easier for the majority party to gerrymander district boundaries to diminish the representation of the…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into critical decision-making processes, such as loan approvals and visa applications, where inherent biases can lead to discriminatory outcomes. In this paper, we examine the nuanced…

How to fairly apportion congressional seats to states has been debated for centuries. We present an alternative perspective on apportionment, centered not on states but "families" of state, sets of states with "divisor-method" quotas with…

The emergence of politically driven divisions in online discussion networks has attracted a wealth of literature, but also one which has thus far been largely limited to single country studies. Hence whilst there is good evidence that these…

Decisions in a shareholder meeting or a legislative committee are often modeled as a weighted game. Influence of a member is then measured by a power index. A large variety of different indices has been introduced in the literature. This…

Accurate modeling of opinion dynamics has the potential to help us understand polarization and what makes effective political discourse possible or impossible. Here, we use physics-based methods to model the evolution of political opinions…

At what level does selective pressure effectively act? When considering the reproductive dynamics of interacting and mutating agents, it has long been debated whether selection is better understood by focusing on the individual or if…