Related papers: Polarization, Abstention, and the Median Voter The…
We study the effect of time-fluctuating social influences on the formation of polarization and consensus in a three-party community consisting of two types of voters ("leftists" and "rightists") holding extreme opinions, and moderate agents…
Political polarization, fueled by public discourse and echo chambers, threatens the foundation of democratic elections. However, traditional one-dimensional opinion models -- assuming ``support for one party equals opposition to another''…
This paper provides a novel summary measure of ideological polarization in the American public based on the joint distribution of survey responses. Intuitively, polarization is maximized when views are concentrated at opposing extremes with…
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…
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…
The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…
The simplified hypothesis that an election is polarized as an explanation of recent electoral outcomes worldwide is centered on perceptions of voting patterns rather than ideological data from the electorate. While the literature focuses on…
We consider the notions of agreement, diversity, and polarization in ordinal elections (that is, in elections where voters rank the candidates). While (computational) social choice offers good measures of agreement between the voters, such…
Mechanism design is concerned with settings where a policymaker (or social planner) faces the problem of aggregating the announced preferences of multiple agents into a collective (or social), system-wide decision. One of the most important…
The controversies around the 2020 US presidential elections certainly casts serious concerns on the efficiency of the current voting system in representing the people's will. Is the naive Plurality voting suitable in an extremely polarized…
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…
We study the contrarian voter model for opinion formation in a society under the influence of an external oscillating propaganda and stochastic noise. Each agent of the population can hold one of two possible opinions on a given issue…
We develop new voting mechanisms for the case when voters and candidates are located in an arbitrary unknown metric space, and the goal is to choose a candidate minimizing social cost: the total distance from the voters to this candidate.…
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,…
The diffusion of opinions in Social Networks is a relevant process for adopting positions and attracting potential voters in political campaigns. Opinion polarization, bias, targeted diffusion, and the radicalization of postures are key…
The well-known Condorcet Jury Theorem states that, under majority rule, the better of two alternatives is chosen with probability approaching one as the population grows. We study an asymmetric setting where voters face varying…
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…
Engaging with dissenting views, fostering productive disagreements or strategic anticonformity can benefit organizations as it challenges the status quo. The question arises, however, whether such strategic anticonformity ultimately leads…
Two of the main factors shaping an individual's opinion are social coordination and personal preferences, or personal biases. To understand the role of those and that of the topology of the network of interactions, we study an extension of…
Metric distortion in social choice is a framework for evaluating how well voting rules minimize social cost when both voters and candidates exist in a shared metric space, with a voter's cost defined by their distance to a candidate. Voters…