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Can Large Language Models (LLMs) accurately predict election outcomes? While LLMs have demonstrated impressive performance in various domains, including healthcare, legal analysis, and creative tasks, their ability to forecast elections…

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in civic, educational, and political information environments, concerns about their potential political bias have grown. Prior research often evaluates such bias through simulated…

A general model of opinion dynamics is introduced in which each individual's opinion is measured on a bounded continuous spectrum. Each opinion is influenced heterogeneously by every other opinion in the population. It is demonstrated that…

Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…

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…

The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As a…

Climate change and political polarisation are two of the 21st century's critical socio-political issues. Here, we investigate their intersection by studying the discussion around the UN Conference of The Parties on Climate Change (COP)…

A sociophysical model for opinion dynamics is shown to embody a series of recent western hung national votes all set at the unexpected and very improbable edge of a fifty-fifty score. It started with the Bush-Gore 2000 American presidential…

Partisan bias in LLMs has been evaluated to assess political leanings, typically through a broad lens and largely in Western contexts. We move beyond identifying general leanings to examine harmful, adversarial representational associations…

We consider the performance of the foremost academic House of Representatives forecasting models in the 2018 elections. In creating open-source implementations of these models, we outline key underlying assumptions. We find that although…

We study an opinion dynamics model in which agents reach compromise via pairwise interactions. When the opinions of two agents are sufficiently close, they both acquire the average of their initial opinions; otherwise, they do not interact.…

Polarization is a major concern for a well-functioning society. Often, mass polarization of a society is driven by polarizing political representation, even when the latter is easily preventable. The existing computational social choice…

Social media are decentralized, interactive, and transformative, empowering users to produce and spread information to influence others. This has changed the dynamics of political communication that were previously dominated by traditional…

We consider an operatorial model of alliances between three political parties which interact with their electors, with the undecided voters, and with the electors of the other parties. This extends what was done in a previous paper, where…

We present a model that explores the influence of persuasion in a population of agents with positive and negative opinion orientations. The opinion of each agent is represented by an integer number $k$ that expresses its level of agreement…

We investigate disagreement and polarization in a social network with two polarizing sources of information. First, we define disagreement and polarization indices in two-party leader-follower models of opinion dynamics. We then give…

In certain parliamentary democracies, there are two major parties that move in and out of power every few elections, and a third minority party that essentially never governs. We present a simple model to account for this phenomenon, in…

Social media is often blamed for the creation of echo chambers. However, these claims fail to consider the prevalence of offline echo chambers resulting from high levels of partisan segregation in the United States. Our article empirically…

Some argue that political stability is best served through a two-party system. This study refutes this. The author mathematically defines the stability and rigidity of electoral systems comprised of any quantity of electors and parties. In…

In this paper, we introduce the Iterative Persuasion-Polarization (IPP) model to study the dynamics of opinion formation and change within a population. The IPP model integrates mechanisms of persuasion and repulsion, where individuals…