Related papers: Divide and Diverge
Explanations of polarization often rely on one of the three mechanisms: homophily, bounded confidence, and community-based interactions. Models based on these mechanisms consider the lack of interactions as the main cause of polarization.…
In recent years, the ease with which social media can be accessed has led to the unexpected problem of a shrinkage in information sources. This phenomenon is caused by a system that facilitates the connection of people with similar ideas…
Modern political interaction is characterized by strong partisanship and a lack of interest in information sharing and agreement across party lines. It remains largely unclear how such partisan echo chambers arise and how they coevolve with…
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…
Political debate nowadays takes place mainly on online social media, with election periods amplifying ideological engagement. Reddit is generally considered more resistant to polarization and echo chamber effects than platforms like Twitter…
Motivated by empirical research on bias and opinion formation, we formulate a multidimensional nonlinear opinion-dynamical model where agents have individual biases, which are fixed, as well as opinions, which evolve. The dimensions…
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…
In the age of information abundance, attention is a coveted resource. Social media platforms vigorously compete for users' engagement, influencing the evolution of their opinions on a variety of topics. With recommendation algorithms often…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
Our model describes competition between groups driven by the choices of self-interested voters within groups. Within a Poisson voting environment, parties observe aggregate support from groups and can allocate prizes or punishments to them.…
This paper offers a strategic rationale for zero-sum thinking in elections. We show that asymmetric information and distributional considerations together make voters wary of policies supported by others. This force impels a majority of…
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…
Post-World War II armed conflicts have often been viewed with higher scrutiny in order to avoid a full-scale global war. This scrutiny has led to the establishment of determinants of war such as poverty, inequalities, literacy, and many…
As political polarization in the United States continues to rise, the question of whether polarized individuals can fruitfully cooperate becomes pressing. Although diversity of individual perspectives typically leads to superior team…
The polarization of political opinions among members of the U.S. legislative chambers measured by their voting records is greater today than it was thirty years ago. Previous research efforts to find causes of such increase have suggested…
Online social networks have become primary means of communication. As they often exhibit undesirable effects such as hostility, polarisation or echo chambers, it is crucial to develop analytical tools that help us better understand them. In…
There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…
Social media has been a paramount arena for election campaigns for political actors. While many studies have been paying attention to the political campaigns related to partisanship, politicians also can conduct different campaigns…
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…
Two of the main factors shaping an individual's opinion are social coordination and personal preferences, or personal biases. To understand the role of those and that of the topology of the network of interactions, we study an extension of…