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Influence among individuals is at the core of collective social phenomena such as the dissemination of ideas, beliefs or behaviors, social learning and the diffusion of innovations. Different mechanisms have been proposed to implement…
Online data has the potential to transform how researchers and companies produce election forecasts. Social media surveys, online panels and even comments scraped from the internet can offer valuable insights into political preferences.…
We study the statistics of turnout rates and results of the French elections since 1992. We find that the distribution of turnout rates across towns is surprisingly stable over time. The spatial correlation of the turnout rates, or of the…
This paper extends the concept of informative selection, population distribution and sample distribution to a spatial process context. These notions were first defined in a context where the output of the random process of interest consists…
The boundaries of electoral constituencies for assembly and parliamentary seats are drafted using a process referred to as delimitation, which ensures fair and equal representation of all citizens. The current delimitation exercise suffers…
The Hotelling-Downs model is a natural and appealing model for understanding strategic positioning by candidates in elections. In this model, voters are distributed on a line, representing their ideological position on an issue. Each…
The paper considers the problem of finding the number of dominant voters in two-level voting procedures. At the first stage, voting is conducted among local groups of voters, and at the second stage, the results are aggregated to form a…
Accounting for undecided and uncertain voters is a challenging issue for predicting election results from public opinion polls. Undecided voters typify the uncertainty of swing voters in polls but are often ignored or allocated to each…
The margin of victory of an election is a useful measure to capture the robustness of an election outcome. It also plays a crucial role in determining the sample size of various algorithms in post election audit, polling etc. In this work,…
Direct democracy is a special case of an ensemble of classifiers, where every person (classifier) votes on every issue. This fails when the average voter competence (classifier accuracy) falls below 50%, which can happen in noisy settings…
Geographical considerations such as contiguity and compactness are necessary elements of political districting in practice. Yet an analysis of the problem without such constraints yields mathematical insights that can inform real-world…
Metric distortion in social choice is a framework for evaluating how well voting rules minimize social cost when both voters and candidates exist in a shared metric space, with a voter's cost defined by their distance to a candidate. Voters…
We introduce the Geography and Election Outcome (GEO) metric, a new method for identifying potential partisan gerrymanders. In contrast with currently popular methods, the GEO metric uses both geographic information about a districting plan…
In this study, we propose a mechanical model of a plurality election based on a mean field voter model. We assume that there are three candidates in each electoral district, i.e., one from the ruling party, one from the main opposition…
In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…
Political actors often manipulate redistricting plans to gain electoral advantages, a process known as gerrymandering. Several states have implemented institutional reforms to address this problem, such as establishing map-drawing…
Election systems based on scores generally determine the winner by computing the score of each candidate and the winner is the candidate with the best score. It would be natural to expect that computing the winner of an election is at least…
In the evolving voter model, when an individual interacts with a neighbor having an opinion different from theirs, they will with probability $1-\alpha$ imitate the neighbor but with probability $ \alpha$ will sever the connection and…
We consider two symmetry metrics commonly used to analyze partisan gerrymandering: the Mean-Median Difference (MM) and Partisan Bias (PB). Our main results compare, for combinations of seats and votes achievable in districted elections, the…
Liquid democracy is a decision-making paradigm in which each agent can either vote directly for some alternative or (transitively) delegate its vote to another agent. To mitigate the issue of delegation cycles or the concentration of power,…