Related papers: Vulnerability of democratic electoral systems
Political moderation, a key attractor in democratic systems, proves highly fragile under realistic information conditions. We develop a stochastic model of opinion dynamics to analyze how noise and differential susceptibility reshape the…
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…
We develop a simple theoretic game a model to analyze the relationship between electoral sys tems and governments' choice in trade policies. We show that existence of international pressure or foreign lobby changes a government's final…
Scoring protocols are a broad class of voting systems. Each is defined by a vector $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2,...,\alpha_m)$, $\alpha_1 \geq \alpha_2 \geq >... \geq \alpha_m$, of integers such that each voter contributes $\alpha_1$ points to…
We introduce Flexible Representative Democracy (FRD), a novel hybrid of Representative Democracy (RD) and Direct Democracy (DD) in which voters can alter the issue-dependent weights of a set of elected representatives. In line with the…
Issue salience is a major determinant in voters' decisions. Candidates and political parties campaign to shift salience to their advantage - a process termed priming. We study the dynamics, strategies and equilibria of campaign spending for…
Shortlisting of candidates--selecting a group of "best" candidates--is a special case of multiwinner elections. We provide the first in-depth study of the computational complexity of strategic voting for shortlisting based on the perhaps…
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…
The fragility index is a clinically motivated metric designed to supplement the $p$ value during hypothesis testing. The measure relies on two pillars: selecting cases to have their outcome modified and modifying the outcomes. The measure…
Much of the theoretical work on strategic voting makes strong assumptions about what voters know about the voting situation. A strategizing voter is typically assumed to know how other voters will vote and to know the rules of the voting…
We consider a two-round election model involving $m$ voters and $n$ candidates. Each voter is endowed with a strict preference list ranking the candidates. In the first round, the candidates are partitioned into two subsets, $A$ and $B$,…
Analysis of vote distributions using current tools from statistical physics is of increasing interest. While data considered for physics studies are subject to a careful understanding of error sources, such analysis are almost absent in…
Considering voting rules based on evaluation inputs rather than preference rankings modifies the paradigm of probabilistic studies of voting procedures. This article proposes several simulation models for generating evaluation-based voting…
We introduce a new framework to study the group dynamics and game-theoretic considerations when voters in a committee are allowed to trade votes. This model represents a significant step forward by considering vote-for-vote trades in a…
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…
Elections, the cornerstone of democratic societies, are usually regarded as unpredictable due to the complex interactions that shape them at different levels. In this work, we show that voter turnouts contain crucial information that can be…
Democratic societies increasingly rely on communication networks to aggregate citizen preferences and information, yet these same networks can systematically mislead voters under certain conditions. We introduce an agent-based model that…
This paper examines an area of Game Theory called Voting Power Theory. With the adoption of a measure theoretic framework it argues that the many different indices and tools currently used for measuring voting power can be replaced by just…
We analyze the network of relations between parliament members according to their voting behavior. In particular, we examine the emergent community structure with respect to political coalitions and government alliances. We rely on tools…
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…