Related papers: Modeling of Political Systems using Wasserstein Gr…

This study examines the relationship between ambiguity and the ideological positioning of political parties across the political spectrum. We identify a strong non-monotonic (inverted U-shaped) relationship between party ideology and…

Competition between varying ideas, people and institutions fuels the dynamics of socio-economic systems. Numerous analyses of the empirical data extracted from different financial markets have established a consistent set of stylized facts…

In a country with many elections, it may prove economically expedient to hold multiple elections simultaneously on a common polling date. We show that in a polarized society, in which each voter has a preferred party, an increase in the…

We construct a family of semimartingales that describes the behavior of a particle system with sticky-reflecting interaction. The model is a physical improvement of the Howitt-Warren flow, an infinite system of diffusion particles on the…

Social influence profoundly impacts individual choices and collective behaviors in politics. In this work, driven by the goal of protecting elections from improper influence, we consider the following scenario: an individual, who has vested…

In this work, we propose FlowTime, a generative model for probabilistic forecasting of multivariate timeseries data. Given historical measurements and optional future covariates, we formulate forecasting as sampling from a learned…

Political moderation, a key attractor in democratic systems, proves highly fragile under realistic information conditions. We develop a stochastic model of opinion dynamics to analyze how noise and differential susceptibility reshape the…

Policy gradients methods often achieve better performance when the change in policy is limited to a small Kullback-Leibler divergence. We derive policy gradients where the change in policy is limited to a small Wasserstein distance (or…

Politically divided societies are also often divided emotionally: people like and trust those with similar political views (in-group favoritism) while disliking and distrusting those with different views (out-group animosity). This…

In opinion dynamics, as in general usage, polarisation is subjective. To understand polarisation, we need to develop more precise methods to measure the agreement in society. This paper presents four mathematical measures of polarisation…

The proliferation of social media platforms, recommender systems, and their joint societal impacts have prompted significant interest in opinion formation and evolution within social networks. We study how local edge dynamics can drive…

Polarization is a well-documented phenomenon across a wide range of social issues. However, prevailing theories often compartmentalize the examination of herding behavior and opinion convergence within different contexts. In this study, we…

Opinion dynamics, the study of how individual beliefs and collective public opinion evolve, is a fertile domain for applying statistical physics to complex social phenomena. Like physical systems, societies exhibit macroscopic regularities…

Explanations of polarization often rely on one of the three mechanisms: homophily, bounded confidence, and community-based interactions. Models based on these mechanisms consider the lack of interactions as the main cause of polarization.…

We introduce principal curves in Wasserstein space, and in general compact metric spaces. Our motivation for the Wasserstein case comes from optimal-transport-based trajectory inference, where a developing population of cells traces out a…

Spatial voting models of legislators' preferences are used in political science to test theories about their voting behavior. These models posit that legislators' ideologies as well as the ideologies reflected in votes for and against a…

Social networks have provided a platform for the effective exchange of ideas or opinions but also served as a hotbed of polarization. While much research attempts to explore different causes of opinion polarization, the effect of perception…

Fairness testing evaluates whether a model satisfies a specified fairness criterion across different groups, yet most research has focused on classification models, leaving regression models underexplored. This paper introduces a framework…

It is known that individual opinions on different policy issues often align to a dominant ideological dimension (e.g. "left" vs. "right") and become increasingly polarized. We provide an agent-based model that reproduces these two stylized…

We model dynamically changing candidate positions in the face of a dynamic electorate. To formulate our equations, we use a space-time-continuous Hegselmann-Krause equation, which we solve using a particle method. We use the combined…