Related papers: Polarization, Abstention, and the Median Voter The…
A multi-level model of opinion formation is presented which takes into account that attitudes on different issues are usually not independent. In the model, agents exchange beliefs regarding a series of facts. A cognitive structure of…
Polarization, defined as the emergence of sharply divided groups with opposing and often extreme views, is an increasingly prominent feature of modern societies. While many studies analyze this phenomenon in the context of single issues,…
We introduce and study a simple model for the dynamics of voting intention in a population of agents that have to choose between two candidates. The level of indecision of a given agent is modeled by its propensity to vote for one of the…
We present a model that explores the influence of persuasion in a population of agents with positive and negative opinion orientations. The opinion of each agent is represented by an integer number $k$ that expresses its level of agreement…
Which level of voting costs is optimal in a democracy? This paper argues that intermediate voting costs - what we term a "Midcost democracy" - should be avoided, as they fail to ensure that electoral outcomes reflect the preferences of the…
The voter model is a classical interacting particle system modelling how consensus is formed across a network. We analyse the time to consensus for the voter model when the underlying graph is a subcritical scale-free random graph.…
The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…
The traditional axiomatic approach to voting is motivated by the problem of reconciling differences in subjective preferences. In contrast, a dominant line of work in the theory of voting over the past 15 years has considered a different…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…
Elections play a fundamental role in democratic societies, however they are often characterized by unexpected results. Here we discuss an election campaign model inspired by the compartmental epidemiology, and we show that the model…
We study the voter model dynamics in the presence of confidence and bias. We assume two types of voters. Unbiased voters whose confidence is indifferent to the state of the voter and biased voters whose confidence is biased towards a common…
Affective polarization, or, inter-party hostility, is increasingly recognized as a pervasive issue in democracies worldwide, posing a threat to social cohesion. The digital media ecosystem, now widely accessible and ever-present, has often…
Has ideological polarization actually increased in the last decades, or have voters simply sorted themselves into parties matching their ideology more closely? We present a novel methodology to quantify multidimensional ideological…
Politically divided societies are also often divided emotionally: people like and trust those with similar political views (in-group favoritism) while disliking and distrusting those with different views (out-group animosity). This…
Opinion diffusion is a crucial phenomenon in social networks, often underlying the way in which a collective of agents develops a consensus on relevant decisions. The voter model is a well-known theoretical model to study opinion spreading…
The form of political polarization where citizens develop strongly negative attitudes towards out-party policies and members has become increasingly prominent across many democracies. Economic hardship and social inequality, as well as…
Polarization is a major concern for a well-functioning society. Often, mass polarization of a society is driven by polarizing political representation, even when the latter is easily preventable. The existing computational social choice…
For centuries, it has been widely believed that the influence of a small coalition of voters is negligible in a large election. Consequently, there is a large body of literature on characterizing the likelihood for an election to be…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
The well-known Condorcet's Jury theorem posits that the majority rule selects the best alternative among two available options with probability one, as the population size increases to infinity. We study this result under an asymmetric…