Related papers: Rationalizing systematic discrepancies between ele…
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…
Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
How often will elections end in landslides? What is the probability for a head-to-head race? Analyzing ballot results from several large countries rather anomalous and yet unexplained distributions have been observed. We identify tactical…
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
The voter model is a simple agent-based model to mimic opinion dynamics in social networks: a randomly chosen agent adopts the opinion of a randomly chosen neighbour. This process is repeated until a consensus emerges. Although the basic…
Elections play a fundamental role in democratic societies, however they are often characterized by unexpected results. Here we discuss an election campaign model inspired by the compartmental epidemiology, and we show that the model…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…
The Trump phenomenon is argued to depart from current populist rise in Europe. According to a model of opinion dynamics from sociophysics the machinery of Trump's amazing success obeys well-defined counter-intuitive rules. Therefore, his…
The drastic effect of local alliances in three-party competition is investigated in democratic hierarchical bottom-up voting. The results are obtained analytically using a model which extends a sociophysics frame introduced in 1986…
This paper introduces the Bradley-Terry Regression Trunk model, a novel probabilistic approach for the analysis of preference data expressed through paired comparison rankings. In some cases, it may be reasonable to assume that the…
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…
Over the years, American politics have become increasingly polarized. In the current political landscape, a president cannot easily collaborate with the opposite party and pass legislature. Ideologies between parties have drifted apart to…
The outcomes of democratic elections rest on individuals' decision-making that is driven by their varying preferences and beliefs. Individuals may prefer consensus to gridlock, or gridlock to consensus, and information may be fractured via…
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…
Large language models are increasingly used to predict human preferences in both scientific and business endeavors, yet current approaches rely exclusively on analyzing model outputs without considering the underlying mechanisms. Using…
Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…
We consider the notions of agreement, diversity, and polarization in ordinal elections (that is, in elections where voters rank the candidates). While (computational) social choice offers good measures of agreement between the voters, such…
With historic misses in the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential elections, interest in measuring polling errors has increased. The most common method for measuring directional errors and non-sampling excess variability during a postmortem for an…
The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…