Related papers: Symmetric Nash equilibrium of political polarizati…
Polarization is a major concern for a well-functioning society. Often, mass polarization of a society is driven by polarizing political representation, even when the latter is easily preventable. The existing computational social choice…
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…
In Hotelling's model of spatial competition, a unit mass of voters is distributed in the interval $[0,1]$ (with their location corresponding to their political persuasion), and each of $m$ candidates selects as a strategy his distinct…
Voters making a binary decision purchase votes from a centralized clearing house, paying the square of the number of votes purchased. The net payoff to an agent with utility $u$ who purchases $v$ votes is $\Psi (S_{n+1})u-v^{2}$, where…
In this paper, we propose a simple and intuitive model to investigate the efficiency of the two-party election system, especially regarding the nomination process. Each of the two parties has its own candidates, and each of them brings…
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…
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…
We introduce the heterogeneous voter model (HVM), in which each agent has its own intrinsic rate to change state, reflective of the heterogeneity of real people, and the partisan voter model (PVM), in which each agent has an innate and…
We model bipartisan elections where voters are exposed to two forces: local homophilic interactions and external influence from two political campaigns. The model is mathematically equivalent to the random field Ising model with a bimodal…
The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum,…
A new model for the dynamics of opinion formation is proposed and analysed at the mean-field level. It can be regarded as a generalization of the noisy voter model in which agents update their binary states by copying others and by an…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. The definition is flexible about the location or boundaries of the center. Using US survey data, the paper shows how this…
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…
The paper considers the problem of finding the number of dominant voters in two-level voting procedures. At the first stage, voting is conducted among local groups of voters, and at the second stage, the results are aggregated to form a…
We study positional voting rules when candidates and voters are embedded in a common metric space, and cardinal preferences are naturally given by distances in the metric space. In a positional voting rule, each candidate receives a score…
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…
The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…
Typical voting rules do not work well in settings with many candidates. If there are just several hundred candidates, then even a simple task such as choosing a top candidate becomes impractical. Motivated by the hope of developing group…
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…
Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…