Related papers: Explaining Differences in Voting Patterns Across V…
We present numerical simulations of a model of social influence, where the opinion of each agent is represented by a binary vector. Agents adjust their opinions as a result of random encounters, whenever the difference between opinions is…
We introduce a variant of the voter model in which agents may have different degrees of confidence on their opinions. Those with low confidence are normal voters whose state can change upon a single contact with a different neighboring…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are a transformational technology, fundamentally changing how people obtain information and interact with the world. As people become increasingly reliant on them for an enormous variety of tasks, a body of…
The Hotelling-Downs model considers parties changing policy to maximise their vote-share. Where policy position lies on a left-right axis, it describes a tendency for political parties to move towards centrist platforms. This is in contrast…
Voting is the aggregation of individual preferences in order to select a winning alternative. Selection of a winner is accomplished via a voting rule, e.g., rank-order voting, majority rule, plurality rule, approval voting. Which voting…
The Shapley-Shubik power index is a measure of each voters power in the passage or failure of a vote. We extend this measure to graphs and consider a discrete-time process in which voters may change their vote based on the outcome of the…
In Hotelling's model of spatial competition, a unit mass of voters is distributed in the interval $[0,1]$ (with their location corresponding to their political persuasion), and each of $m$ candidates selects as a strategy his distinct…
Many societal decision problems lie in high-dimensional continuous spaces not amenable to the voting techniques common for their discrete or single-dimensional counterparts. These problems are typically discretized before running an…
Parliaments dominated by two political blocs often face legislative inefficiencies as polarization increases. A central institutional question concerns how majority and supermajority rules interact with parliamentary composition to balance…
Research on the causes of political polarization points towards multiple drivers of the problem, from social and psychological to economic and technological. However, political institutions stand out, because -- while capable of…
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…
We study how electoral rules shape polarization dynamics when voters and candidates both adapt to repeated election outcomes. We introduce two geometric primitives for comparing rules under this feedback: the \emph{winner radius} $R_t =…
Consider the decision-making setting where agents elect a panel by expressing both positive and negative preferences. Prominently, in constitutional AI, citizens democratically select a slate of ethical preferences on which a foundation…
We examine kinetic symmetry breaking phenomena in an evolutionary political game in which voters, inhabiting a multidimensional ideological space, cast ballots via selection mechanisms subject to the competing forces of conformity and…
Conventional ideal point models rely on Gaussian or quadratic utility functions that violate the triangle inequality, producing non-metric distances that complicate geometric interpretation and undermine clustering and dispersion-based…
Political candidates often shift their positions opportunistically in hopes of capturing more votes. When there are only two candidates, the best strategy for each of them is often to move towards the other. This eventually results in two…
In this paper, we seek to understand how politicians use images to express ideological rhetoric through Facebook images posted by members of the U.S. House and Senate. In the era of social media, politics has become saturated with imagery,…
We consider elections where the voters come one at a time, in a streaming fashion, and devise space-efficient algorithms which identify an approximate winning committee with respect to common multiwinner proportional representation voting…
Multi-winner voting is the process of selecting a fixed-size set of representative candidates based on voters' preferences. It occurs in applications ranging from politics (parliamentary elections) to the design of modern computer…
While lobbying has been demonstrated to have an important effect on public opinion and policy making, existing models of opinion formation do not specifically include its effect. In this work we introduce a new model of lobbying-driven…