Related papers: Polarization, Abstention, and the Median Voter The…
An individual's opinions about media bias derive from their own independent assessment of media outputs combined with peer pressure from networked political allies and opponents. Here we generalize previous idealized, probabilistic models…
In approval-based multiwinner voting, voters express approval preferences over a set of candidates, and the goal is to return a winning committee. This model captures a broad range of subset selection problems under preferences. Prior work…
We present an opinion model founded upon the principles of the bounded confidence interaction among agents. Our objective is to explain the polarization effects inherent to vector-valued opinions. The evolutionary process adheres to the…
Recent analysis of social communications among humans has revealed that the interval between interactions for a pair of individuals and for an individual often follows a long-tail distribution. We investigate the effect of such a…
A voting center is in charge of collecting and aggregating voter preferences. In an iterative process, the center sends comparison queries to voters, requesting them to submit their preference between two items. Voters might discuss the…
We develop a model of social media in which users produce different types of content and choose whom to follow. Even when abstracting from algorithmic bias, linking costs shape networks and polarization. In the welfare-maximizing…
Opinion polarization is a ubiquitous phenomenon in opinion dynamics. In contrast to the traditional consensus oriented group decision making (GDM) framework, this paper proposes a framework with the co-evolution of both opinions and…
A key promise of democratic voting is that, by accounting for all constituents' preferences, it produces decisions that benefit the constituency overall. It is alarming, then, that all deterministic voting rules have unbounded distortion:…
We consider a two-round election model involving $m$ voters and $n$ candidates. Each voter is endowed with a strict preference list ranking the candidates. In the first round, the candidates are partitioned into two subsets, $A$ and $B$,…
May's Theorem [K. O. May, Econometrica 20 (1952) 680-684] characterizes majority voting on two alternatives as the unique preferential voting method satisfying several simple axioms. Here we show that by adding some desirable axioms to…
We study how motivated reasoning affects the provision of climate policy in an electoral competition framework. Voters experience anticipatory disutility when future outcomes appear grim and may therefore distort beliefs in response to…
The median-voter hypothesis predicts convergence of party platforms across a one-dimensional political spectrum during majoritarian elections. Assuming that the convergence is reflected in legislative activity, we study the time evolution…
Social influence profoundly impacts individual choices and collective behaviors in politics. In this work, driven by the goal of protecting elections from improper influence, we consider the following scenario: an individual, who has vested…
We consider elections where both voters and candidates can be associated with points in a metric space and voters prefer candidates that are closer to those that are farther away. It is often assumed that the optimal candidate is the one…
Political moderation, a key attractor in democratic systems, proves highly fragile under realistic information conditions. We develop a stochastic model of opinion dynamics to analyze how noise and differential susceptibility reshape the…
Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…
Much of the theoretical work on strategic voting makes strong assumptions about what voters know about the voting situation. A strategizing voter is typically assumed to know how other voters will vote and to know the rules of the voting…
This article extends the analysis of Atkinson, Foley, and Ganz in "Beyond the Spoiler Effect: Can Ranked-Choice Voting Solve the Problem of Political Polarization?". Their work uses a one-dimensional spatial model based on survey data from…
Since the 1960s, Democrats and Republicans in U.S. Congress have taken increasingly polarized positions, while the public's policy positions have remained centrist and moderate. We explain this apparent contradiction by developing a…
It is known that individual opinions on different policy issues often align to a dominant ideological dimension (e.g. "left" vs. "right") and become increasingly polarized. We provide an agent-based model that reproduces these two stylized…