Related papers: A systems framework for remedying dysfunction in U…
We explore a new mechanism to explain polarization phenomena in opinion dynamics in which agents evaluate alternative views on the basis of the social feedback obtained on expressing them. High support of the favored opinion in the social…
With a folk understanding that political polarization refers to socio-political divisions within a society, many have proclaimed that we are more divided than ever. In this account, polarization has been blamed for populism, the erosion of…
In representative democracies, the election of new representatives in regular election cycles is meant to prevent corruption and other misbehavior by elected officials and to keep them accountable in service of the ``will of the people."…
Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of…
Feedback is a most important concept in control systems, its main purpose is to deal with internal and/or external uncertainties in dynamical systems, by using the on-line observed information. Thus, a fundamental problem in control theory…
Political polarization in public space can seriously hamper the function and the integrity of contemporary democratic societies. In this paper, we propose a novel measure of such polarization, which, by way of simple topic modelling,…
We present a novel approach to the measurement of American state legislature polarization with an experimental comparison of three different machine learning algorithms. Our approach strictly relies on public data sources and open source…
Understanding the social conditions that tend to increase or decrease polarization is important for many reasons. We study a network-structured agent-based model of opinion dynamics, extending a model previously introduced by Flache 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:…
Political systems shape institutions and govern institutional change supporting economic performance, production and diffusion of technological innovation. This study shows, using global data of countries, that institutional change, based…
Ensuring legislative accountability in multi-party systems requires quantitative tools that reveal actual voting behavior beyond formal party affiliations. We present a network-based framework for analyzing parliamentary dynamics at…
The increasing polarization in democratic societies is an emergent outcome of political opinion dynamics. Yet, the fundamental mechanisms behind the formation of political opinions, from individual beliefs to collective consensus, remain…
Advanced AI systems capable of generating humanlike text and multimodal content are now widely available. In this paper, we discuss the impacts that generative artificial intelligence may have on democratic processes. We consider the…
Notwithstanding the usefulness of system dynamics in analyzing complex policy problems, policy design is far from straightforward and in many instances trial-and-error driven. To address this challenge, we propose to combine system dynamics…
The effects of social media on critical issues, such as polarization and misinformation, are under scrutiny due to the disruptive consequences that these phenomena can have on our societies. Among the algorithms routinely used by social…
This paper introduces Democracy-in-Silico, an agent-based simulation where societies of advanced AI agents, imbued with complex psychological personas, govern themselves under different institutional frameworks. We explore what it means to…
The identification of states and parameters from noisy measurements of a dynamical system is of great practical significance and has received a lot of attention. Classically, this problem is expressed as optimization over a class of models.…
This paper provides a novel summary measure of ideological polarization in the American public based on the joint distribution of survey responses. Intuitively, polarization is maximized when views are concentrated at opposing extremes with…
Echo chambers and opinion polarization recently quantified in several sociopolitical contexts and across different social media, raise concerns on their potential impact on the spread of misinformation and on openness of debates. Despite…
Opinion polarization is on the rise, causing concerns for the openness of public debates. Additionally, extreme opinions on different topics often show significant correlations. The dynamics leading to these polarized ideological opinions…