Related papers: Electoral David vs Goliath: How does the Spatial C…
Election control considers the problem of an adversary who attempts to tamper with a voting process, in order to either ensure that their favored candidate wins (constructive control) or another candidate loses (destructive control). As…
Proponents of participatory democracy praise Liquid Democracy: decisions are taken by referendum, but voters delegate their votes freely. When better informed voters are present, delegation can increase the probability of a correct…
We consider the notions of agreement, diversity, and polarization in ordinal elections (that is, in elections where voters rank the candidates). While (computational) social choice offers good measures of agreement between the voters, such…
Crowd movement guidance has been a fascinating problem in various fields, such as easing traffic congestion in unusual events and evacuating people from an emergency-affected area. To grab the reins of crowds, there has been considerable…
Independent voters play an increasingly decisive role in contemporary elections, yet their collective behavior remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how a minority of voters with greater flexibility in their political…
The traditional election control problem focuses on the use of control to promote a single candidate. In parliamentary elections, however, the focus shifts: voters care no less about the overall governing coalition than the individual…
Competition between varying ideas, people and institutions fuels the dynamics of socio-economic systems. Numerous analyses of the empirical data extracted from different financial markets have established a consistent set of stylized facts…
Classical spatial models of two-party competition typically predict convergence to the median voter, yet real-world party systems often exhibit persistent and asymmetric polarization. We develop a spatial model of two-party competition in…
We investigate the problem of winner determination from computational social choice theory in the data stream model. Specifically, we consider the task of summarizing an arbitrarily ordered stream of $n$ votes on $m$ candidates into a small…
Mass Media outlets have occupied the central role of the political scenario, and are persuasive in the process of opinion formation of the citizens. In particular, the study of the relationship between Mass Media and behaviour of citizens…
There is a class of models for pol/mil/econ bargaining and conflict that is loosely based on the Median Voter Theorem which has been used with great success for about 30 years. However, there are fundamental mathematical limitations to…
For centuries, it has been widely believed that the influence of a small coalition of voters is negligible in a large election. Consequently, there is a large body of literature on characterizing the likelihood for an election to be…
The electoral college of voting system for the US presidential election is analogous to a coarse graining procedure commonly used to study phase transitions in physical systems. In a recent paper, opinion dynamics models manifesting a phase…
Elections constitute a paradigm of decision-making problems that have puzzled experts of different disciplines for decades. We study two decision-making problems, where groups make decisions that impact only themselves as a group. In both…
Spatially-situated opinions that can be held with different degrees of conviction lead to spatio-temporal patterns such as clustering (homophily), polarization, and deadlock. Our goal is to understand how sensitive these patterns are to…
In a country with many elections, it may prove economically expedient to hold multiple elections simultaneously on a common polling date. We show that in a polarized society, in which each voter has a preferred party, an increase in the…
The two most common types of electoral systems (ES) used in electing national legislatures are proportional representation and plurality voting. When they are evaluated, most often the arguments come from social choice theory and political…
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…
The estimation of voting blocs is an important statistical inquiry in political science. However, the scope of these analyses is usually restricted to roll call data where individual votes are directly observed. Here, we examine a Bayesian…
This paper considers elections in which voters choose one candidate each, independently according to known probability distributions. A candidate receiving a strict majority (absolute or relative, depending on the version) wins. After the…