Related papers: Negative votes to depolarize politics
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…
We consider a social choice problem where only a small number of people out of a large population are sufficiently available or motivated to vote. A common solution to increase participation is to allow voters use a proxy, that is, transfer…
We discuss voting scenarios in which the set of voters (agents) and the set of alternatives are the same; that is, voters select a single representative from among themselves. Such a scenario happens, for instance, when a committee selects…
A new model for the dynamics of opinion formation is proposed and analysed at the mean-field level. It can be regarded as a generalization of the noisy voter model in which agents update their binary states by copying others and by an…
News outlets, surveyors, and other organizations often conduct polls on social networks to gain insights into public opinion. Such a poll is typically started by someone on a social network who sends it to her friends. If a person…
Given the stated preferences of several people over a number of proposals regarding public policy initiatives, some of those proposals might be judged to be more ``divisive'' than others. When designing online participatory platforms to…
How can voters induce politicians to put forth more proximate (in terms of preference) as well as credible platforms (in terms of promise fulfillment) under repeated elections? Building on the work of Aragones et al. (2007), I study how…
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…
Instant runoff voting (IRV) has recently gained popularity as an alternative to plurality voting for political elections, with advocates claiming a range of advantages, including that it produces more moderate winners than plurality and…
Political polarization in public space can seriously hamper the function and the integrity of contemporary democratic societies. In this paper, we propose a novel measure of such polarization, which, by way of simple topic modelling,…
Framing bias plays a significant role in exacerbating political polarization by distorting the perception of actual events. Media outlets with divergent political stances often use polarized language in their reporting of the same event. We…
This study seeks to identify and quantify biases in simulating political samples with Large Language Models, specifically focusing on vote choice and public opinion. Using the GPT-3.5-Turbo model, we leverage data from the American National…
Considering voting rules based on evaluation inputs rather than preference rankings modifies the paradigm of probabilistic studies of voting procedures. This article proposes several simulation models for generating evaluation-based voting…
Since Downs proposed that the act of voting is irrational in 1957, myriad models have been proposed to explain voting and account for observed turnout patterns. We propose a model in which partisans consider both the instrumental and…
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…
Plurality and approval voting are two well-known voting systems with different strengths and weaknesses. In this paper we consider a new voting system we call beta(k) which allows voters to select a single first-choice candidate and approve…
This paper models voters who invest effort to determine whether a particular claim relevant to their voting choices is correct. If a voter succeeds in determining whether the claim is correct, this information is shared via a social…
Understanding and quantifying polarization in social systems is important because of many reasons. It could for instance help to avoid segregation and conflicts in the society or to control polarized debates and predict their outcomes. In…
With the recent advances of networking technology, connections among people are unprecedentedly enhanced. People with different ideologies and backgrounds interact with each other, and there may exist severe opinion polarization and…
Digital traces of conversations in micro-blogging platforms and OSNs provide information about user opinion with a high degree of resolution. These information sources can be exploited to under- stand and monitor collective behaviors. In…