Related papers: Rationalizing systematic discrepancies between ele…
Political polarization has been a subject that has attracted many studies in recent years. We have developed an opinion dynamics model with affective homophily effect and national social norm effect to describe this phenomenon. The time…
The belief that numbers offer a single, objective description of reality overlooks a crucial truth: data does not speak for itself. Every dataset results from choices-what to measure, how, when, and with whom-which inevitably reflect…
Defying the median voter theorem, party polarization has spread globally, especially in the United States. As concerns grow over its risks to democracy, political science has probed its causes, revealing two paradoxes: while polarization…
We consider two-alternative elections where voters' preferences depend on a state variable that is not directly observable. Each voter receives a private signal that is correlated to the state variable. Voters may be "contingent" with…
Mechanism design is concerned with settings where a policymaker (or social planner) faces the problem of aggregating the announced preferences of multiple agents into a collective (or social), system-wide decision. One of the most important…
Often times, a candidate's attractiveness is directly associated with his clear ideologies and opinions on various policies and social issues. Using the ideas of stochastic differential equations and Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process, we develop a…
This paper uses daily Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data to estimate the causal effect of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, a highly competitive race whose outcome resolved lingering uncertainty on election day, on…
Election results are determined by numerous social factors that affect the formation of opinion of the voters, including the network of interactions between them and the dynamics of opinion influence. In this work we study the result of…
The median voter theorem has long been the default model of voter behavior and candidate choice. While contemporary work on the distribution of political opinion has emphasized polarization and an increasing gap between the "left" and the…
Donald Trump was lagging behind in nearly all opinion polls leading up to the 2016 US presidential election, but he surprisingly won the election. This raises the following important questions: 1) why most opinion polls were not accurate in…
A national voting population, when segmented into groups like, for example, different states, can yield a counter-intuitive scenario where the winner may not necessarily get the most number of total votes. A recent example is the 2016…
At the tipping point, it is known that small incident can trigger dramatic societal shift. Getting early-warning signals for such changes are valuable to avoid detrimental outcomes such as riots or collapses of nations. However, it is…
To many statisticians and citizens, the outcome of the most recent U.S. presidential election represents a failure of data-driven methods on the grandest scale. This impression has led to much debate and discussion about how the election…
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…
Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…
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…
Political polarization has become a growing concern in democratic societies, as it drives tribal alignments and erodes civic deliberation among citizens. Given its prevalence across different countries, previous research has sought to…
We show how hidden interesting subelections can be discovered in ordinal elections. An interesting subelection consists of a reasonably large set of voters and a reasonably large set of candidates such that the former have a consistent…
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…
We view voting rules as classifiers that assign a winner (a class) to a profile of voters' preferences (an instance). We propose to apply techniques from formal explainability, most notably abductive and contrastive explanations, to…