Related papers: Polarization, Abstention, and the Median Voter The…
The voter model is a toy model of consensus formation based on nearest-neighbor interactions. A voter sits at each vertex in a hypercubic lattice (of dimension $d$) and is in one of two possible opinion states. The opinion state of each…
This study examines the relationship between ambiguity and the ideological positioning of political parties across the political spectrum. We identify a strong non-monotonic (inverted U-shaped) relationship between party ideology and…
Polarization is a well-documented phenomenon across a wide range of social issues. However, prevailing theories often compartmentalize the examination of herding behavior and opinion convergence within different contexts. In this study, we…
We consider distributed elections, where there is a center and $k$ sites. In such distributed elections, each voter has preferences over some set of candidates, and each voter is assigned to exactly one site such that each site is aware…
Predicting the winner of an election is a favorite problem both for news media pundits and computational social choice theorists. Since it is often infeasible to elicit the preferences of all the voters in a typical prediction scenario, a…
We study a stochastic model for the diffusion of competing opinions in a population composed of three types of agents: trend-followers, opposers, and indifferent individuals. The decision dynamics are driven by reinforcement mechanisms,…
In an election, we are given a set of voters, each having a preference list over a set of candidates, that are distributed on a social network. We consider a scenario where voters may change their preference lists as a consequence of the…
Perceptions of political bias in the media are formed directly, through the independent consumption of the published outputs of a media organization, and indirectly, through observing the collective responses of political allies and…
Accurate modeling of opinion dynamics has the potential to help us understand polarization and what makes effective political discourse possible or impossible. Here, we use physics-based methods to model the evolution of political opinions…
We propose a computational framework for modeling opinion dynamics in electoral competitions that combines two realistic features: voter memory and exogenous shocks. The population is represented by a fully-connected network of agents, each…
Polls posted on social media have emerged in recent years as an important tool for estimating public opinion, e.g., to gauge public support for business decisions and political candidates in national elections. Here, we examine nearly two…
Polarization is a problem in modern society. Understanding how opinions evolve through social interactions is crucial for addressing conditions that lead to polarization, consensus, or opinion diversity. Classical opinion dynamics models…
We consider a social choice problem where only a small number of people out of a large population are sufficiently available or motivated to vote. A common solution to increase participation is to allow voters use a proxy, that is, transfer…
The widespread emergence of opinion polarization is often attributed to the rise of social media and the internet, which can promote selective exposure and the formation of echo chambers. However, experimental evidence shows that exposure…
We address the fundamental problem of selection under uncertainty by modeling it from the perspective of Bayesian persuasion. In our model, a decision maker with imperfect information always selects the option with the highest expected…
We generalize a binary majority-vote model on adaptive networks to its plurality-vote counterpart and analyze the time scale to consensus when voters are given more than two options. When opinions are uniformly distributed in the population…
We study single-candidate voting embedded in a metric space, where both voters and candidates are points in the space, and the distances between voters and candidates specify the voters' preferences over candidates. In the voting, each…
By incorporating a multilayer network and time-decaying memory into the original voter model, the coupled effects of spatial and temporal cumulation of peer pressure on consensus are investigated. Heterogeneity in peer pressure and…
In social choice theory with ordinal preferences, a voting method satisfies the axiom of positive involvement if adding to a preference profile a voter who ranks an alternative uniquely first cannot cause that alternative to go from winning…
We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…