Related papers: Partisan affect and political outsiders
We study strategic candidate nomination by parties in elections decided by Plurality voting. Each party selects a nominee before the election, and the winner is chosen from the nominated candidates based on the voters' preferences. We…
We analyze different ways of pairing agents in a bipartite matching problem, with regard to its scaling properties and to the distribution of individual ``satisfactions''. Then we explore the role of partial information and bounded…
In this paper, the influence of the social media on the opinion formation process is modeled during an election campaign. In the proposed model, peer- to-peer interactions and targeted online propaganda messages are assumed to be the…
A multi-level model of opinion formation is presented which takes into account that attitudes on different issues are usually not independent. In the model, agents exchange beliefs regarding a series of facts. A cognitive structure of…
Political campaigns involve, in the simplest case, two competing campaign groups which try to obtain a majority of votes. We propose a novel mathematical framework to study political campaign dynamics on social networks whose constituents…
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
We investigate, through a kinetic-exchange model, the impact that an external field, like advertising and propaganda, has on opinion dynamics. We address the situations where two opposite alternatives can be selected but the possibility of…
A main issue in improving public sector efficiency is to understand to what extent public appointments are based on worker capability, instead of being used to reward political supporters (patronage). I contribute to a recent literature…
People are influenced by the choices of others, a phenomenon observed across contexts in the social and behavioral sciences. Social influence can lock in an initial popularity advantage of an option over a higher quality alternative. Yet…
We introduce a socially motivated extension of the voter model in which individual voters are also influenced by two opposing, fixed-opinion news sources. These sources forestall consensus and instead drive the population to a politically…
To better understand discriminations and the effect of affirmative actions in selection problems (e.g., college admission or hiring), a recent line of research proposed a model based on differential variance. This model assumes that the…
We consider the problem of designing affirmative action policies for selecting the top-k candidates from a pool of applicants. We assume that for each candidate we have socio-demographic attributes and a series of variables that serve as…
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…
This paper considers the ranking problem of candidates for a certain position based on ballot papers filled by voters. We suggest a ranking procedure of alternatives using cooperative game theory methods. For this, it is necessary to…
In many real world elections, agents are not required to rank all candidates. We study three of the most common methods used to modify voting rules to deal with such partial votes. These methods modify scoring rules (like the Borda count),…
We describe and contrast two distinct problem areas for statistical causality: studying the likely effects of an intervention ("effects of causes"), and studying whether there is a causal link between the observed exposure and outcome in an…
Consider an election between two candidates in which the voters' choices are random and independent and the probability of a voter choosing the first candidate is $p>1/2$. Condorcet's Jury Theorem which he derived from the weak law of large…
Classical spatial models predict platform convergence, yet empirical polarization persists. This paper proposes a non-electoral mechanism: lobbying as a monopsonistic market for legislative support. Here, extreme benefactors must pay more…
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…
We investigate large-scale effects induced by external fields, phenomenologically interpreted as mass media, in multiagent models evolving with the microscopic dynamics of the binary naming game. In particular, we show that a single…