Related papers: Replicating Electoral Success
In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…
Most social choice rules assume access to full rankings, while current alignment practice -- despite aiming for diversity -- typically treats voters as anonymous and comparisons as independent, effectively extracting only about one bit per…
The paper considers the problem of finding the number of dominant voters in two-level voting procedures. At the first stage, voting is conducted among local groups of voters, and at the second stage, the results are aggregated to form a…
People tend to align their use of language to the linguistic behaviour of their own ingroup and to simultaneously diverge from the language use of outgroups. This paper proposes to model this phenomenon of sociolinguistic identity…
When people pursue rewards in stochastic environments, they often match their choice frequencies to the observed target frequencies, even when this policy is demonstrably sub-optimal. We used a ``hide and seek'' task to evaluate this…
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…
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…
In this paper we extend some recent results on an operatorial approach to the description of alliances between political parties interacting among themselves and with a basin of electors. In particular, we propose and compare three…
We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interference by third parties. For example, suppose votes have been cast in an election between two candidates, and then each vote is randomly changed with a small…
We study candidates' positioning when adjustments are possible in response to new information about voters' preferences. Re-positioning allows candidates to get closer to the median voter but is costly both financially and electorally. We…
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…
Numerous models in opinion dynamics focus on the temporal dynamics within a single electoral unit (e.g., country). The empirical observations, on the other hand, are often made across multiple electoral units (e.g., polling stations) at a…
In addressing the challenge of exponential scaling with the number of agents we adopt a cluster-based representation to approximately solve asymmetric games of very many players. A cluster groups together agents with a similar "strategic…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
We study the effect of strategic behavior in iterative voting for multiple issues under uncertainty. We introduce a model synthesizing simultaneous multi-issue voting with Meir, Lev, and Rosenschein (2014)'s local dominance theory and…
We consider the problem of manipulating elections by cloning candidates. In our model, a manipulator can replace each candidate c by several clones, i.e., new candidates that are so similar to c that each voter simply replaces c in his vote…
We investigate a variation of the classical voter model in which the set of influencing agents depends on an individual's current opinion. The initial population consists of a random sample of equally sized sub-populations for each state,…
We consider the problem of manipulation of elections using positional voting rules under Impartial Culture voter behaviour. We consider both the logical possibility of coalitional manipulation, and the number of voters that must be…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
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…