Related papers: Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Reinforcement: …
A model of the opinion dynamics underlying the political decision is proposed. The analysis is restricted to a bipolar scheme with a possible third political area. The interaction among voters is local but the final decision strongly…
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…
Echo chambers are defined by the simultaneous presence of opinion polarization with respect to a controversial topic and homophily, i.e. the preference of individuals to interact with like-minded peers. While recent efforts have been…
The stochastic dynamics of the multi-state voter model is investigated on a class of complex networks made of non-overlapping cliques, each hosting a political candidate and interacting with the others via Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi links. Numerical…
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 theory of echo chambers, which suggests that online political discussions take place in conditions of ideological homogeneity, has recently gained popularity as an explanation for patterns of political polarization and radicalization…
Increasingly taking place in online spaces, modern political conversations are typically perceived to be unproductively affirming -- siloed in so called ``echo chambers'' of exclusively like-minded discussants. Yet, to date we lack…
While lobbying has been demonstrated to have an important effect on public opinion and policy making, existing models of opinion formation do not specifically include its effect. In this work we introduce a new model of lobbying-driven…
Strategic manipulation of elections is typically studied in the context of promoting individual candidates. In parliamentary elections, however, the focus shifts: voters may care more about the overall governing coalition than the…
Election polls play a critical role in political discussions by probing public opinion and enabling political parties to assess their performance before elections. However, traditional polling methods sometimes fail to predict election…
Recent findings showed that users on Facebook tend to select information that adhere to their system of beliefs and to form polarized groups -- i.e., echo chambers. Such a tendency dominates information cascades and might affect public…
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…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) often achieves higher sample efficiency in practice than model-free RL by learning a dynamics model to generate samples for policy learning. Previous works learn a dynamics model that fits under the…
The voter model is a simple agent-based model to mimic opinion dynamics in social networks: a randomly chosen agent adopts the opinion of a randomly chosen neighbour. This process is repeated until a consensus emerges. Although the basic…
The theory of influences in product measures has profound applications in theoretical computer science, combinatorics, and discrete probability. This deep theory is intimately connected to functional inequalities and to the Fourier analysis…
We study the effects of campaigning, where the society is partitioned into voter clusters and a diffusion process propagates opinions in a network connecting the clusters. Our model is very powerful and can incorporate many campaigning…
Predicting how Congressional legislators will vote is important for understanding their past and future behavior. However, previous work on roll-call prediction has been limited to single session settings, thus did not consider…
Echo chambers in online social networks, in which users prefer to interact only with ideologically-aligned peers, are believed to facilitate misinformation spreading and contribute to radicalize political discourse. In this paper, we gauge…
We investigate the effects of delayed interactions on the stationary distribution of the noisy voter model. We assume that the delayed interactions occur through the periodic polling mechanism and replace the original instantaneous…