Related papers: How Democracies Polarize: A Multilevel Perspective
Ensuring legislative accountability in multi-party systems requires quantitative tools that reveal actual voting behavior beyond formal party affiliations. We present a network-based framework for analyzing parliamentary dynamics at…
The outcomes of democratic elections rest on individuals' decision-making that is driven by their varying preferences and beliefs. Individuals may prefer consensus to gridlock, or gridlock to consensus, and information may be fractured via…
Affective polarization and increasing social divisions affect social mixing and the spread of information across online and physical spaces, reinforcing social and electoral cleavages and influencing political outcomes. Here, using…
The formation of agents' opinions in a social system is the result of an intricate equilibrium among several driving forces. On the one hand, the social pressure exerted by peers favours the emergence of local consensus. On the other hand,…
A critical issue for society today is the emergence and decline of democracy worldwide. It is unclear, however, how democratic features, such as elections and civil liberties, influence this change. Democracy indices, which are the standard…
We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interference by third parties. For example, suppose votes have been cast in an election between two candidates, and then each vote is randomly changed with a small…
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…
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…
Many models have been proposed to explain opinion formation in groups of individuals; most of these models study opinion propagation as the interaction between nodes/agents in a social network. Opinion formation is a complex process and a…
Many large-scale, complex systems consist of interactions between humans, human-made systems and the environment. The approach developed in this paper is to partition the problem space into two fundamental layers and identify, parameterize…
We investigate the distribution of partisanship in a cross-section of ten diverse States to elucidate how votes translate into seats won and other metrics. Markov chain simulations taking into account partisanship distribution agree…
Changes in political geography and electoral district boundaries shape representation in the United States Congress. To disentangle the effects of geography and gerrymandering, we generate a large ensemble of alternative redistricting plans…
We investigate how information-spreading mechanisms affect opinion dynamics and vice-versa via an agent-based simulation on adaptive social networks. First, we characterize the impact of reposting on user behavior with limited memory, a…
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 investigate how crises alter societies by analyzing the timing and channels of change using a longitudinal multi-wave survey of a representative sample of Americans throughout 2020. This methodology allows us to overcome some of the…
Deliberative processes are often discussed as increasing or decreasing polarization. This approach misses a different, and arguably more diagnostic, dimension of opinion change: whether deliberation reshuffles who agrees with whom, or…
Despite many examples to the contrary, most models of elections assume that rules determining the winner will be followed. We present a model where elections are solely a public signal of the incumbent popularity, and citizens can protests…
In recent years, social media has increasingly become an important platform for political campaigns, especially elections. It remains elusive how exactly public discourse is driven by the intricate interplay between individual…
Independent voters play an increasingly decisive role in contemporary elections, yet their collective behavior remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how a minority of voters with greater flexibility in their political…
Large language models are increasingly used to predict human preferences in both scientific and business endeavors, yet current approaches rely exclusively on analyzing model outputs without considering the underlying mechanisms. Using…