Related papers: Vulnerability of democratic electoral systems
Information has exploded on the Internet and mobile with the advent of the big data era. In particular, recommendation systems are widely used to help consumers who struggle to select the best products among such a large amount of…
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…
The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is an annual event which attracts millions of viewers. It is an interesting activity to examine since the participants of the competition represent a particular country's musical performance that will be…
The existing system for determining election results in Australia is, for the most part, secure, accurate and understandable by the average voter. This thesis explores the design of electronic voting systems designed to achieve these same…
Social polarization is a growing concern worldwide, as it strains social relations, erodes trust in institutions, and thus threatens democratic societies. Academic efforts to understand this phenomenon have traditionally approached it from…
There is a class of models for pol/mil/econ bargaining and conflict that is loosely based on the Median Voter Theorem which has been used with great success for about 30 years. However, there are fundamental mathematical limitations to…
This past decade has seen a noticeable uptick in asymmetric election results along with the inevitable claims of gerrymandering and litigation. Research, too, has followed, giving rise to intense scrutiny of elections, where the goal is to…
Online data has the potential to transform how researchers and companies produce election forecasts. Social media surveys, online panels and even comments scraped from the internet can offer valuable insights into political preferences.…
Nowadays there is an increasing interest of physicists in finding regularities related to social phenomena. This interest is clearly motivated by applications that a statistical mechanical description of the human behavior may have in our…
The availability of electoral data in electronic format allowed to physicist and mathematicians their own analysis. Beyond theoretical models for electoral processes, new regularities had been found in the data analysis of many countries…
The paper provides an analysis of the voting method known as delegable proxy voting, or liquid democracy. The analysis first positions liquid democracy within the theory of binary aggregation. It then focuses on two issues of the system:…
Population protocols are a relatively novel computational model in which very resource-limited anonymous agents interact in pairs with the goal of computing predicates. We consider the probabilistic version of this model, which naturally…
American democracy is currently heavily reliant on plurality in single-member districts, or PSMD, as a system of election. But public perceptions of fairness are often keyed to partisan proportionality, or the degree of congruence between…
Political polarization is perceived as a threat to democracies. Using the Galam model of opinion dynamics deployed in a five-dimensional parameter space, I show that polarization is the byproduct of an essential hallmark of a vibrant…
We propose a framework for strategic voting when a voter may lack knowledge about the preferences of other voters, or about other voters' knowledge about her own preference. In this setting we define notions of manipulation, equilibrium,…
A social system is susceptible to perturbation when its collective properties depend sensitively on a few pivotal components. Using the information geometry of minimal models from statistical physics, we develop an approach to identify…
In computational social choice, the distortion of a voting rule quantifies the degree to which the rule overcomes limited preference information to select a socially desirable outcome. This concept has been investigated extensively, but…
Many networks do not live in isolation but are strongly interacting, with profound consequences on their dynamics. Here, we consider the case of two interacting social networks and, in the context of a simple model, we address the case of…
Election poll reporting often focuses on mean values and only subordinately discusses the underlying uncertainty. Subsequent interpretations are too often phrased as certain. Moreover, media coverage rarely adequately takes into account the…
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…