Related papers: Evaluating District-based Election Surveys with Sy…
In parliamentary elections, parties compete for a limited, typically fixed number of seats. Most parliaments are assembled using apportionment methods that distribute the seats based on the parties' vote counts. Common apportionment methods…
Gerrymandering voting districts is one of the most salient concerns of contemporary American society, and the creation of new voting maps, along with their subsequent legal challenges, speaks for much of our modern political discourse. The…
In this paper we propose a novel method to forecast the result of elections using only official results of previous ones. It is based on the voter model with stubborn nodes and uses theoretical results developed in a previous work of ours.…
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…
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.…
As granular data about elections and voters become available, redistricting simulation methods are playing an increasingly important role when legislatures adopt redistricting plans and courts determine their legality. These simulation…
We study how office-seeking parties use direct democracy to shape elections. A party with a strong electoral base can benefit from using a binding referendum to resolve issues that divide its core supporters. When referendums do not bind,…
Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is used in several countries around the world. It requires voters to rank candidates in order of preference, and uses a counting algorithm that is more complex than systems such as first-past-the-post or scoring…
Ranked voting systems, such as instant-runoff voting (IRV) and single transferable vote (STV), are used in many places around the world. They are more complex than plurality and scoring rules, presenting a challenge for auditing their…
Neural Posterior Estimation methods for simulation-based inference can be ill-suited for dealing with posterior distributions obtained by conditioning on multiple observations, as they tend to require a large number of simulator calls to…
There are many sources of error in counting votes: the apparent winner might not be the rightful winner. Hand tallies of the votes in a random sample of precincts can be used to test the hypothesis that a full manual recount would find a…
In multiwinner approval elections with many candidates, voters may struggle to determine their preferences over the entire slate of candidates. It is therefore of interest to explore which (if any) fairness guarantees can be provided under…
In public health management there is a need to produce subnational estimates of health outcomes. Often, however, funds are not available to collect samples large enough to produce traditional survey sample estimates for each subnational…
In representative democracy, a redistricting map is chosen to partition an electorate into districts which each elects a representative. A valid redistricting map must satisfy a collection of constraints such as being compact, contiguous,…
Human dynamics and sociophysics build on statistical models that can shed light on and add to our understanding of social phenomena. We propose a generative model based on a stochastic differential equation that enables us to model the…
A most debated topic of the last years is whether simple statistical physics models can explain collective features of social dynamics. A necessary step in this line of endeavour is to find regularities in data referring to large scale…
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…
We study the use of Temporal-Difference learning for estimating the structural parameters in dynamic discrete choice models. Our algorithms are based on the conditional choice probability approach but use functional approximations to…
This note corrects a technical error in Guardiola (2020, Journal of Statistical Distributions and Applications), presents updated derivations, and offers an extended discussion of the properties of the spherical Dirichlet distribution.…
The process of drawing electoral district boundaries is known as political redistricting. Within this context, gerrymandering is the practice of drawing these boundaries such that they unfairly favor a particular political party, often…