Related papers: Negative votes to depolarize politics
I study an election between two ideologically polarized parties that are both office- and policy-motivated. The parties compete by proposing policies on a single issue. The analysis uncovers a non-monotonic relationship between ideological…
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…
Political polarization is perceived as a threat to democracies. Using the Galam model of opinion dynamics deployed in a five-dimensional parameter space, I show that polarization is the byproduct of an essential hallmark of a vibrant…
A key promise of democratic voting is that, by accounting for all constituents' preferences, it produces decisions that benefit the constituency overall. It is alarming, then, that all deterministic voting rules have unbounded distortion:…
We consider the problem of predicting winners in elections, for the case where we are given complete knowledge about all possible candidates, all possible voters (together with their preferences), but where it is uncertain either which…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. By being flexible about the location or width of the center, this measure enables the researcher to analyze polarization…
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…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
Politically divided societies are also often divided emotionally: people like and trust those with similar political views (in-group favoritism) while disliking and distrusting those with different views (out-group animosity). This…
We extend Approval voting to the settings where voters may have intransitive preferences. The major obstacle to applying Approval voting in these settings is that voters are not able to clearly determine who they should approve or…
With a folk understanding that political polarization refers to socio-political divisions within a society, many have proclaimed that we are more divided than ever. In this account, polarization has been blamed for populism, the erosion of…
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…
The suggestions generated by most existing recommender systems are known to suffer from a lack of diversity, and other issues like popularity bias. As a result, they have been observed to promote well-known "blockbuster" items, and to…
Prior research shows that public opinion on climate politics sorts along partisan lines. However, they leave open the question of whether climate politics and other politically salient issues exhibit tendencies for issue alignment, which…
The median-voter hypothesis (MVH) predicts convergence of two party platforms across a one-dimensional political spectrum during majoritarian elections. From the viewpoint of the MVH, an explanation of polarization is that each election has…
Recent empirical findings suggest that societies have become more polarized in various countries. That is, the median voter of today represents a smaller fraction of society compared to two decades ago and yet, the mechanisms underlying…
The form of political polarization where citizens develop strongly negative attitudes towards out-party policies and members has become increasingly prominent across many democracies. Economic hardship and social inequality, as well as…
Polarization is implicated in the erosion of democracy and the progression to violence, which makes the polarization properties of large algorithmic content selection systems (recommender systems) a matter of concern for peace and security.…
In recent years, the ease with which social media can be accessed has led to the unexpected problem of a shrinkage in information sources. This phenomenon is caused by a system that facilitates the connection of people with similar ideas…
We analyze the structure of the disagreement among a population of voters over a set of alternatives. Surveys typically ask either for pairwise comparisons, simple and intuitive for participants, or full rankings over alternatives,…