Related papers: Divide and Diverge
Democracy often fails to meet its ideals, and these failures may be made worse by electoral institutions. Unwanted outcomes include polarized institutions, unresponsive representatives, and the ability of a faction of voters to gain power…
In rank aggregation, members of a population rank issues to decide which are collectively preferred. We focus instead on identifying divisive issues that express disagreements among the preferences of individuals. We analyse the properties…
We consider two-opinion voter models on dense dynamic random graphs. Our goal is to understand and describe the occurrence of consensus versus polarisation over long periods of time. The former means that all vertices have the same opinion,…
There are some shreds of evidence that social opinion polarization leads to the breakup of the relationship, some in the scale of small communities, but others can divide large organizations or even a nation. The legacy methodology to…
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…
Polarization of opinions has been empirically noted in many online social network platforms. Traditional models of opinion dynamics, based on statistical physics principles, do not account for the emergence of polarization and echo chambers…
This paper revisits the limitations of the Median Voter Theorem and introduces a novel framework to analyze the optimal economic ideological positions of political parties. By incorporating Nash equilibrium, we examine the mechanisms and…
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
This paper contributes to an emerging literature that models votes and text in tandem to better understand polarization of expressed preferences. It introduces a new approach to estimate preference polarization in multidimensional settings,…
An increasing number of politicians are relying on cheaper, easier to access technologies such as online social media platforms to communicate with their constituency. These platforms present a cheap and low-barrier channel of communication…
How does targeted advertising influence electoral outcomes? This paper presents a one-dimensional spatial model of voting in which a privately informed challenger persuades voters to support him over the status quo. I show that targeted…
Bipartite matching problem is to study two disjoint groups of agents who need to be matched pairwise. It can be applied to many real-world scenarios and explain many social phenomena. In this article, we study the effect of competition on…
Understanding the social conditions that tend to increase or decrease polarization is important for many reasons. We study a network-structured agent-based model of opinion dynamics, extending a model previously introduced by Flache and…
Democrats and Republicans have seemed to grow apart in the past three decades. Since the United States as we know it today is undeniably bipartisan, this phenomenon would not appear as a surprise to most. However, there are triggers which…
In this paper, we show that when policy-motivated parties can commit to a particular platform during a uni-dimensional electoral contest where valence issues do not arise there must be a positive association between the policies preferred…
Political polarization, a key driver of social fragmentation, has drawn increasing attention for its role in shaping online and offline discourse. Despite significant efforts, accurately measuring polarization within ideological…
Political polarization is traditionally analyzed through the ideological stances of groups and parties, but it also has a behavioral component that manifests in the interactions between individuals. We present an empirical analysis of the…
Health misinformation is believed to have contributed to vaccine hesitancy during the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting concerns about the role of social media in polarization and social stability. While previous research has identified a…
Polarization issue is generally subject to ideological polarization and affective polarization. In particular, affective polarization usually accelerates the polarization process and transform social interactions into a zero-sum game. Yet,…
What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good,…