Related papers: Electoral Accountability and Selection with Person…

We consider two-alternative elections where voters' preferences depend on a state variable that is not directly observable. Each voter receives a private signal that is correlated to the state variable. Voters may be "contingent" with…

In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…

We study how personalized news aggregation for rationally inattentive voters (NARI) affects policy polarization and public opinion. In a two-candidate electoral competition model, an attention-maximizing infomediary aggregates source data…

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…

There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…

The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…

We develop a model of electoral accountability with mainstream and alternative media. In addition to regular high- and low-competence types, the incumbent may be an aspiring autocrat who controls the mainstream media and will subvert…

Numerous models in opinion dynamics focus on the temporal dynamics within a single electoral unit (e.g., country). The empirical observations, on the other hand, are often made across multiple electoral units (e.g., polling stations) at a…

Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…

Individual and social biases undermine the effectiveness of human advisers by inducing judgment errors which can disadvantage protected groups. In this paper, we study the influence these biases can have in the pervasive problem of fake…

Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…

Does electoral replacement ensure that officeholders eventually act in voters' interests? We study a reputational model of accountability. Voters observe incumbents' performance and decide whether to replace them. Politicians may be "good"…

We study an outcome of a vote in a population of voters exposed to an externally applied bias in favour of one of two potential candidates. The population consists of ordinary individuals, that are in majority and tend to align their…

Research on the causes of political polarization points towards multiple drivers of the problem, from social and psychological to economic and technological. However, political institutions stand out, because -- while capable of…

We develop an equilibrium theory of attention and politics. In a spatial model of electoral competition where candidates have varying policy preferences, we examine what kinds of political behaviors capture voters' limited attention and how…

The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum,…

Confirmation bias and peer pressure both have substantial impacts on the formation of collective decisions. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to study how the interplay between these two mechanisms affects public opinion evolution.…

We compare two scenarios in a model where politicians offer local public goods to heterogeneous voters: one where politicians have access to data on voters and thus can target specific ones, and another where politicians only decide on the…

Democratic societies increasingly rely on communication networks to aggregate citizen preferences and information, yet these same networks can systematically mislead voters under certain conditions. We introduce an agent-based model that…

We study a two-alternative voting game where voters' preferences depend on an unobservable world state and each voter receives a private signal correlated to the true world state. We consider the collective decision when voters can…