Related papers: Effect of influence in voter models and its applic…
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…
There are many factors that can influence the outcome of an election. We here identify two dominant effects that can affect the votes obtained by a candidate, namely, the Majority Effect and the Media Effect. We mimic these two effects in a…
Integrity of elections is vital to democratic systems, but it is frequently threatened by malicious actors. The study of algorithmic complexity of the problem of manipulating election outcomes by changing its structural features is known as…
We present numerical simulations of a model of social influence, where the opinion of each agent is represented by a binary vector. Agents adjust their opinions as a result of random encounters, whenever the difference between opinions is…
Strategic voting, or manipulation, is the process by which a voter misrepresents his preferences in an attempt to elect an outcome that he considers preferable to the outcome under sincere voting. It is generally agreed that manipulation is…
In this paper we study the impact of news media and public surveys on the electoral campaigns for political competitions. We present an agent-based model that addresses the effective influence of surveys in orienting the opinions of voters…
In the context of computational social choice, we study voting methods that assign a set of winners to each profile of voter preferences. A voting method satisfies the property of positive involvement (PI) if for any election in which a…
Election control considers the problem of an adversary who attempts to tamper with a voting process, in order to either ensure that their favored candidate wins (constructive control) or another candidate loses (destructive control). As…
How should we evaluate the effect of a policy on the likelihood of an undesirable event, such as conflict? The significance test has three limitations. First, relying on statistical significance misses the fact that uncertainty is a…
Traditional mediation analysis typically examines the relations among an intervention, a time-invariant mediator, and a time-invariant outcome variable. Although there may be a direct effect of the intervention on the outcome, there is a…
For centuries, it has been widely believed that the influence of a small coalition of voters is negligible in a large election. Consequently, there is a large body of literature on characterizing the likelihood for an election to be…
We examine the effects of introducing a political outsider to the nomination process leading to an election. To this end, we develop a sequential game where politicians -- insiders and outsiders -- make a platform offer to a party, and…
Online social networks are used to diffuse opinions and ideas among users, enabling a faster communication and a wider audience. The way in which opinions are conditioned by social interactions is usually called social influence. Social…
News outlets, surveyors, and other organizations often conduct polls on social networks to gain insights into public opinion. Such a poll is typically started by someone on a social network who sends it to her friends. If a person…
Researchers are often challenged with assessing the impact of an intervention on an outcome of interest in situations where the intervention is non-randomised, the intervention is only applied to one or few units, the intervention is…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
Mass Media outlets have occupied the central role of the political scenario, and are persuasive in the process of opinion formation of the citizens. In particular, the study of the relationship between Mass Media and behaviour of citizens…
Errors are inevitable in the implementation of any complex process. Here we examine the effect of random errors on Single Transferable Vote (STV) elections, a common approach to deciding multi-seat elections. It is usually expected that…
We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two alternatives at…