Related papers: The Determinants of Democracy Revisited: An Instru…
This paper aims to identify the robust determinants of corruption after integrating out the effects of spatial spillovers in corruption levels between countries. In other words, we want to specify which variables play the most critical role…
Instrumental variables are a popular tool to infer causal effects under unobserved confounding, but choosing suitable instruments is challenging in practice. We propose gIVBMA, a Bayesian model averaging procedure that addresses this…
In accordance with "Democracy's Effect on Development: More Questions than Answers", we seek to carry out a study in following the description in the 'Questions for Further Study.' To that end, we studied 33 countries in the Sub-Saharan…
This study demonstrates the persistent dominance of identity based voting across democratic systems, using the United States as a primary case and comparative analyses of 19 other democracies as counterfactuals. Drawing solely on election…
We find that, in the 21st century, democracy has persistent negative impacts on growth in GDP and night-time light intensity. This finding emerges from five different instrumental variable strategies that account for potential invalidity in…
A critical issue for society today is the emergence and decline of democracy worldwide. It is unclear, however, how democratic features, such as elections and civil liberties, influence this change. Democracy indices, which are the standard…
Invariant prediction [Peters et al., 2016] analyzes feature/outcome data from multiple environments to identify invariant features - those with a stable predictive relationship to the outcome. Such features support generalization to new…
Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so (Galileo Galilei). According to the above sentence we do not ask why we need to measure democracy but if it is possible to measure something which is not unequivocally defined.…
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…
The emergence and decline of democratic systems worldwide raises fundamental questions about the dynamics of political change. Contrary to the idea of a stable endpoint of liberal democracy, recent backsliding towards less democratic…
Despite the frequent use of agent-based models (ABMs) for studying social phenomena, parameter estimation remains a challenge, often relying on costly simulation-based heuristics. This work uses variational inference to estimate the…
The voter model with memory-dependent dynamics is theoretically and numerically studied at the mean-field level. The `internal age', or time an individual spends holding the same state, is added to the set of binary states of 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…
We develop a method to perform model averaging in two-stage linear regression systems subject to endogeneity. Our method extends an existing Gibbs sampler for instrumental variables to incorporate a component of model uncertainty. Direct…
Previous studies have offered a variety of explanations on the relationship between democracy and the internet. However, most of these studies concentrate on regions, specific states or authoritarian regimes. No study has investigated the…
A social system is susceptible to perturbation when its collective properties depend sensitively on a few pivotal components. Using the information geometry of minimal models from statistical physics, we develop an approach to identify…
We introduce the incremental voter model (IVM), a discrete-opinion multi-agent system where agents undergo step-wise transitions biased by the opinion of a randomly selected persuader. Our incremental voter model comprises a large…
This paper addresses mechanisms for boundedly rational decision makers in discrete choice problem. First, we introduce two mathematical models of population dynamics with conformity biases. We next analyze the models in terms of…
Focusing on a specific crowd dynamics situation, including real life experiments and measurements, our paper targets a twofold aim: (1) we present a Bayesian probabilistic method to estimate the value and the uncertainty (in the form of a…
An important question in representative democracies is how to determine the optimal parliament size of a given country. According to an old conjecture, known as the cubic root law, there is a fairly universal power-law relation, with an…