Related papers: Mapping Election Polarization and Competitiveness …
Election polls play a critical role in political discussions by probing public opinion and enabling political parties to assess their performance before elections. However, traditional polling methods sometimes fail to predict election…
Since the 1960s, Democrats and Republicans in U.S. Congress have taken increasingly polarized positions, while the public's policy positions have remained centrist and moderate. We explain this apparent contradiction by developing a…
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…
Social and political polarization is a significant source of conflict and poor governance in many societies. Thus, understanding its causes has become a priority of scholars across many disciplines. Here we demonstrate that shifts in…
Search engines (SEs) and large language models (LLMs) are central to political information access, yet their algorithmic decisions and potential underlying biases remain underexplored. We developed a standardized, privacy-preserving,…
Political polarization, fueled by public discourse and echo chambers, threatens the foundation of democratic elections. However, traditional one-dimensional opinion models -- assuming ``support for one party equals opposition to another''…
Polarization and echo chambers are often studied in the context of explicitly political events such as elections, and little scholarship has examined the mixing of political groups in non-political contexts. A major obstacle to studying…
In almost every election cycle, the validity of the United States Electoral College is brought into question. The 2016 Presidential Election again brought up the issue of a candidate winning the popular vote but not winning the Electoral…
Political polarization is a significant issue in American politics, influencing public discourse, policy, and consumer behavior. While studies on polarization in news media have extensively focused on verbal content, non-verbal elements,…
Motivated by putting empirical work based on (synthetic) election data on a more solid mathematical basis, we analyze six distances among elections, including, e.g., the challenging-to-compute but very precise swap distance and the distance…
Contemporary societies are often "polarized", in the sense that sub-groups within these societies hold stably opposing beliefs, even when there is a fact of the matter. Extant models of polarization do not capture the idea that some beliefs…
The challenge of understanding the collective behaviors of social systems can benefit from methods and concepts from physics [1-6], not because humans are similar to electrons, but because certain large-scale behaviors can be understood…
Consider an undirected graph G, representing a social network, where each node is blue or red, corresponding to positive or negative opinion on a topic. In the voter model, in discrete time rounds, each node picks a neighbour uniformly at…
This paper examines a novel proxy for political polarization, initially proposed by Caliskan et al., which estimates intergroup distances using computer vision. Analyzing 1,400+ YouTube videos with advanced object detection, their study…
The pursuit of truth is central to democratic deliberation and governance, yet political discourse reflects varying epistemic orientations, ranging from evidence-based reasoning grounded in verifiable information to intuition-based…
In the United States electoral system, a candidate is elected indirectly by winning a majority of electoral votes cast by individual states, the election usually being decided by the votes cast by a small number of "swing states" where the…
We investigate the dynamics of opinion formation on social networking platforms, focusing on how individual opinions, influenced by both social connections and platform algorithms, evolve. We model this process using a differential…
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…
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 $B$,…
The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities -- the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics -- has been a focus of interest for…