Related papers: A systems framework for remedying dysfunction in U…
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…
The challenge of understanding the collective behaviors of social systems can benefit from methods and concepts from physics [1-6], not because humans are similar to electrons, but because certain large-scale behaviors can be understood…
Social polarization is a growing concern worldwide, as it strains social relations, erodes trust in institutions, and thus threatens democratic societies. Academic efforts to understand this phenomenon have traditionally approached it from…
The polarization of political opinions among members of the U.S. legislative chambers measured by their voting records is greater today than it was thirty years ago. Previous research efforts to find causes of such increase have suggested…
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…
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…
Extreme polarization can undermine democracy by making compromise impossible and transforming politics into a zero-sum game. Ideological polarization - the extent to which political views are widely dispersed - is already strong among…
As the world's democratic institutions are challenged by dissatisfied citizens, political scientists and also computer scientists have proposed and analyzed various (innovative) methods to select representative bodies, a crucial task in…
Political polarization is perceived as a threat to democracies. Using the Galam model of opinion dynamics deployed in a five-dimensional parameter space, I show that polarization is the byproduct of an essential hallmark of a vibrant…
The dynamics of political opinion are a critical component of modern society with large-scale implications for the evolution of intra- and international political discourse and policy. Here we utilize recent high-resolution survey data to…
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,…
Like many other voting systems, Majority Judgement suffers from the weaknesses of the underlying mathematical model: Elections as problem of choice or ranking. We show how the model can be enhanced to take into account the complete process…
Politics around the world exhibits increasing polarization, demonstrated in part by rigid voting configurations in institutions like legislatures or courts. A crux of polarization is separation along a unidimensional ideological axis, but…
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…
Polarization is implicated in the erosion of democracy and the progression to violence, which makes the polarization properties of large algorithmic content selection systems (recommender systems) a matter of concern for peace and security.…
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…
This systematic literature review seeks to explain the mechanisms and implications of information disorder for public policy and the democratic process, by proposing a five-stage framework capturing its full life cycle. To our knowledge, no…
There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…
Despite many examples to the contrary, most models of elections assume that rules determining the winner will be followed. We present a model where elections are solely a public signal of the incumbent popularity, and citizens can protests…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…