Related papers: Polarization, Abstention, and the Median Voter The…
We introduce the threshold $q$-voter opinion dynamics where an agent, facing a binary choice, can change its mind when at least $q_0$ amongst $q$ neighbors share the opposite opinion. Otherwise, the agent can still change its mind with a…
In this paper, we propose a new averaging model for modeling the competitive influence of $K$ candidates among $n$ voters in an election process. For such an influence propagation model, we address the question of how many seeded voters a…
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…
News articles of varying degrees of truthfulness and political alignment, and their influences on the political opinions of the media consumers are modeled as a Bayesian network incorporating a mixture of ideas from dual-reasoning models of…
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…
We investigate the dynamics of opinion formation on social networking platforms, focusing on how individual opinions, influenced by both social connections and platform algorithms, evolve. We model this process using a differential…
With historic misses in the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential elections, interest in measuring polling errors has increased. The most common method for measuring directional errors and non-sampling excess variability during a postmortem for an…
In traditional voter models, opinion dynamics are driven by interactions between individuals, where an individual adopts the opinion of a randomly chosen neighbor. However, these models often fail to capture the emergence of entirely new…
Users online tend to join polarized groups of like-minded peers around shared narratives, forming echo chambers. The echo chamber effect and opinion polarization may be driven by several factors including human biases in information…
May's Theorem (1952), a celebrated result in social choice, provides the foundation for majority rule. May's crucial assumption of symmetry, often thought of as a procedural equity requirement, is violated by many choice procedures that…
We study individuals' willingness to engage with others who hold opposite views on polarizing policies. A representative sample of 2,507 Americans are given the opportunity to listen to recordings of fellow countrymen and women expressing…
Consider an election where N seats are distributed among parties with proportions p_1,...,p_m of the votes. We study, for the common divisor and quota methods, the asymptotic distribution, and in particular the mean, of the seat excess of a…
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…
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…
In this paper, we consider the voter model with popularity bias. The influence of each node on its neighbors depends on its degree. We find the consensus probabilities and expected consensus times for each of the states. We also find the…
Spatial voting models of legislators' preferences are used in political science to test theories about their voting behavior. These models posit that legislators' ideologies as well as the ideologies reflected in votes for and against a…
Inspired by the spread of discontent as in the 2016 presidential election, we consider a voter model in which 0's are ordinary voters and 1's are zealots. Thinking of a social network, but desiring the simplicity of an infinite object that…
In multiwinner approval elections with many candidates, voters may struggle to determine their preferences over the entire slate of candidates. It is therefore of interest to explore which (if any) fairness guarantees can be provided under…
Non-linear voter models assume that the opinion of an agent depends on the opinions of its neighbors in a non-linear manner. This allows for voting rules different from majority voting. While the linear voter model is known to reach…
In the metric distortion problem, a set of voters and candidates lie in a common metric space, and a committee of $k$ candidates must be elected. The objective is to minimize a social cost, defined as a function of the distances between…