Related papers: Negative votes to depolarize politics

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 democracies, major policy decisions typically require some form of majority or consensus, so elites must secure mass support to govern. Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass…

In the context of computational social choice, we study voting methods that assign a set of winners to each profile of voter preferences. A voting method satisfies the property of positive involvement (PI) if for any election in which a…

Recommendation systems leverage user interaction data to suggest relevant items while filtering out irrelevant (negative) ones. The rise of large language models (LLMs) has garnered increasing attention for their potential in recommendation…

While we typically focus on data visualization as a tool for facilitating cognitive tasks (e.g., learning facts, making decisions), we know relatively little about their second-order impacts on our opinions, attitudes, and values. For…

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…

In rank aggregation, members of a population rank issues to decide which are collectively preferred. We focus instead on identifying divisive issues that express disagreements among the preferences of individuals. We analyse the properties…

Political polarization, a key driver of social fragmentation, has drawn increasing attention for its role in shaping online and offline discourse. Despite significant efforts, accurately measuring polarization within ideological…

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…

Popularity bias is a persistent issue associated with recommendation systems, posing challenges to both fairness and efficiency. Existing literature widely acknowledges that reducing popularity bias often requires sacrificing recommendation…

Polarization of opinions has been empirically noted in many online social network platforms. Traditional models of opinion dynamics, based on statistical physics principles, do not account for the emergence of polarization and echo chambers…

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…

We present an alternative voting system that aims at bridging the gap between proportional representative systems and majoritarian, single winner election systems. The system lets people vote for multiple parties, but then assigns each…

Integrity of elections is vital to democratic systems, but it is frequently threatened by malicious actors. The study of algorithmic complexity of the problem of manipulating election outcomes by changing its structural features is known as…

Voter fraud in the United States is rare and the vote-counting system is robust against tampering, but there remains widespread distrust in the security of election infrastructure among the public. We consider statistical means of detecting…

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,…

We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…

This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. The definition is flexible about the location or boundaries of the center. Using US survey data, the paper shows how this…

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…

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…