Related papers: How Democracies Polarize: A Multilevel Perspective
The related concepts of partisan belief systems, issue alignment, and partisan sorting are central to our understanding of politics. These phenomena have been studied using measures of alignment between pairs of topics, or how much…
Representative democracy in the United States relies on election systems that transmit votes into representatives in three key bodies: the two chambers of the federal legislature (House of Representatives and Senate) and the Electoral…
I study an election between two ideologically polarized parties that are both office- and policy-motivated. The parties compete by proposing policies on a single issue. The analysis uncovers a non-monotonic relationship between ideological…
Polarization is a ubiquitous phenomenon in social systems. Empirical studies document substantial evidence for opinion polarization across social media, showing a typical bipolarized pattern devising individuals into two groups with…
Despite global connectivity, societies seem to be increasingly polarized and fragmented. This phenomenon is rooted in the underlying complex structure and dynamics of social systems. Far from homogeneously mixing or adopting conforming…
Studying political activity on social media often requires defining and measuring political stances of users or content. Relevant examples include the study of opinion polarization, or the study of political diversity in online content…
Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. The sources of influence can be generally divided into external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. By being flexible about the location or width of the center, this measure enables the researcher to analyze polarization…
Uncertainty persists over how and why some countries become democratic and others do not, or why some countries remain democratic and others 'backslide' toward autocracy. Furthermore, while scholars generally agree on the nature of…
Here we present \texttt{electoral\_sim}, an open-source Python framework for simulating and comparing electoral systems across diverse voter preference distributions. The framework represents voters and candidates as points in a…
Opinion dynamics models how the publicly expressed opinions of users in a social network coevolve according to their neighbors as well as their own intrinsic opinion. Motivated by the real-world manipulation of social networks during the…
Elections for public offices in democratic nations are large-scale examples of collective decision-making. As a complex system with a multitude of interactions among agents, we can anticipate that universal macroscopic patterns could emerge…
Coalition forming is investigated among countries, which are coupled with short range interactions, under the influence of external fields produced by the existence of global alliances. The model rests on the natural model of coalition…
Democrats and Republicans have seemed to grow apart in the past three decades. Since the United States as we know it today is undeniably bipartisan, this phenomenon would not appear as a surprise to most. However, there are triggers which…
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…
Affective polarization, or, inter-party hostility, is increasingly recognized as a pervasive issue in democracies worldwide, posing a threat to social cohesion. The digital media ecosystem, now widely accessible and ever-present, has often…
We explore a new mechanism to explain polarization phenomena in opinion dynamics in which agents evaluate alternative views on the basis of the social feedback obtained on expressing them. High support of the favored opinion in the social…
We study the mutual influence of authority and persuasion in the flow of opinion. Many social organizations are characterized by a hierarchical structure where the propagation of opinion is asymmetric. In the normal flow of opinion…
Many democratic countries use district-based elections where there is a "seat" for each district in the governing body. In each district, the party whose candidate gets the maximum number of votes wins the corresponding seat. The result of…