Related papers: Statistical Considerations on Political Responsivi…
We develop methods to evaluate whether a political districting accurately represents the will of the people. To explore and showcase our ideas, we concentrate on the congressional districts for the U.S. House of representatives and use the…
Search engines are commonly used for online political information seeking. Yet, it remains unclear how search query suggestions for political searches that reflect the latent interest of internet users vary across countries and over time.…
Large-scale data from social media have a significant potential to describe complex phenomena in real world and to anticipate collective behaviors such as information spreading and social trends. One specific case of study is represented by…
We study the multifaceted question of how to sample approval elections in a meaningful way. Our analysis aims to discern the properties of various statistical cultures (both established and new ones). Based on the map-of-elections framework…
This study investigates political discourse in the German parliament, the Bundestag, by analyzing approximately 28,000 parliamentary speeches from the last five years. Two machine learning models for topic and sentiment classification were…
Data of proportional elections show a striking feature: If the parties are ranked according to the number of their voters, the number of votes grows exponentially with the rank of the party. This so-called Zipf's law has been reported…
We collect and analyze the data for working time, life expectancy, and the pair output and infrastructure of industrializing nations. During S-functional recovery from disaster the pair's time shifts yield 25 years for the infrastructure's…
Parliamentary and legislative debate transcripts provide informative insight into elected politicians' opinions, positions, and policy preferences. They are interesting for political and social sciences as well as linguistics and natural…
U.S. presidential elections are decided by the Electoral College, established in 1789, and designed to mitigate potential risks arising from the collusion of large groups of citizens. A statewide winner-take-all popular voting system for…
Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. The sources of influence can be generally divided into external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An…
An election is a process through which citizens in liberal democracies select their governing bodies, usually through voting. For elections to be truly honest, people must be able to vote freely without being subject to coercion; that is…
Empirical growth analysis has three major problems --- variable selection, parameter heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence --- which are addressed independently from each other in most studies. The purpose of this study is to propose…
The median-voter hypothesis predicts convergence of party platforms across a one-dimensional political spectrum during majoritarian elections. Assuming that the convergence is reflected in legislative activity, we study the time evolution…
Opinion polls have now become a very important component of society because they are now a defacto component of our daily news cycle and because their results influence governments and business in ways which are not always obvious to us.…
Elections seem simple---aren't they just counting? But they have a unique, challenging combination of security and privacy requirements. The stakes are high; the context is adversarial; the electorate needs to be convinced that the results…
The rising attention to the spreading of fake news and unsubstantiated rumors on online social media and the pivotal role played by confirmation bias led researchers to investigate different aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental evidence…
In this contribution we analyze a parties' vote share distribution across the polling stations during the Lithuanian parliamentary elections of 1992, 2008 and 2012. We find that the distribution is rather well fitted by the Beta…
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…
We introduce time variation in the flip-rates of the Voter Model. This type of generalisation is relevant to models of ageing in language change, allowing the representation of changes in speakers' learning rates over their lifetime and may…
While the number and variety of models to explain opinion exchange dynamics is huge, attempts to justify the model results using empirical data are relatively rare. As linking to real data is essential for establishing model credibility,…