Related papers: Polarization, Abstention, and the Median Voter The…

The voter model is a simple agent-based model to mimic opinion dynamics in social networks: a randomly chosen agent adopts the opinion of a randomly chosen neighbour. This process is repeated until a consensus emerges. Although the basic…

We study mechanisms for candidate selection that seek to minimize the social cost, where voters and candidates are associated with points in some underlying metric space. The social cost of a candidate is the sum of its distances to each…

We study how electoral rules shape polarization dynamics when voters and candidates both adapt to repeated election outcomes. We introduce two geometric primitives for comparing rules under this feedback: the \emph{winner radius} $R_t =…

In order to truly understand how social media might shape online discourses or contribute to societal polarization, we need refined models of platform choice, that is: models that help us understand why users prefer one social media…

Issue salience is a major determinant in voters' decisions. Candidates and political parties campaign to shift salience to their advantage - a process termed priming. We study the dynamics, strategies and equilibria of campaign spending for…

Many democratic societies have become more politically polarized, with the U.S. as the main example. The origins of this phenomenon are still not well-understood and subject to debate. To better understand the mechanisms underlying…

Political polarization has become a growing concern in democratic societies, as it drives tribal alignments and erodes civic deliberation among citizens. Given its prevalence across different countries, previous research has sought to…

We study positional voting rules when candidates and voters are embedded in a common metric space, and cardinal preferences are naturally given by distances in the metric space. In a positional voting rule, each candidate receives a score…

Contemporary societies are often "polarized", in the sense that sub-groups within these societies hold stably opposing beliefs, even when there is a fact of the matter. Extant models of polarization do not capture the idea that some beliefs…

Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…

In certain parliamentary democracies, there are two major parties that move in and out of power every few elections, and a third minority party that essentially never governs. We present a simple model to account for this phenomenon, in…

The outcomes of democratic elections rest on individuals' decision-making that is driven by their varying preferences and beliefs. Individuals may prefer consensus to gridlock, or gridlock to consensus, and information may be fractured via…

Accounting for undecided and uncertain voters is a challenging issue for predicting election results from public opinion polls. Undecided voters typify the uncertainty of swing voters in polls but are often ignored or allocated to each…

Despite the prevalence of voting systems in the real world there is no consensus among researchers of how people vote strategically, even in simple voting settings. This paper addresses this gap by comparing different approaches that have…

Understanding the nature of strategic voting is the holy grail of social choice theory, where game-theory, social science and recently computational approaches are all applied in order to model the incentives and behavior of voters. In a…

In the framework of the three-party constrained voter model, where voters of two radical parties (A and B) interact with "centrists" (C and Cz), we study the competition between a persuasive majority and a committed minority. In this model,…

Mass Media outlets have occupied the central role of the political scenario, and are persuasive in the process of opinion formation of the citizens. In particular, the study of the relationship between Mass Media and behaviour of citizens…

We study the effect of latency on binary-choice opinion formation models. Latency is introduced into the models as an additional dynamic rule: after a voter changes its opinion, it enters a waiting period of stochastic length where no…

The voter model is a paradigm of ordering dynamics. At each time step, a random node is selected and copies the state of one of its neighbors. Traditionally, this state has been considered as a binary variable. Here, we relax this…

Consider an undirected graph G, representing a social network, where each node is blue or red, corresponding to positive or negative opinion on a topic. In the voter model, in discrete time rounds, each node picks a neighbour uniformly at…