Related papers: Democratic Favor Channel
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…
This paper offers a synthesis of the empirical literature on the effects of monetary policy. Using the findings from an extensive collection of meta-analyses, it evaluates the effectiveness of conventional and unconventional monetary policy…
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,…
Within the last two decades, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has been observed as one of the prime instruments in the process of restructuring the European economies in transition. Many scholars argue that FDI is expected to be a source of…
The challenge of understanding the collective behaviors of social systems can benefit from methods and concepts from physics [1-6], not because humans are similar to electrons, but because certain large-scale behaviors can be understood…
Political polarization is perceived as a threat to democracies. Using the Galam model of opinion dynamics deployed in a five-dimensional parameter space, I show that polarization is the byproduct of an essential hallmark of a vibrant…
Politically divided societies are also often divided emotionally: people like and trust those with similar political views (in-group favoritism) while disliking and distrusting those with different views (out-group animosity). This…
Is a commercial mass media, dependent on the market for its sustenance, necessary, or even desirable, for liberal democracy? Yochai Benkler has argued that a decentralized, peer-to-peer system of communications and information is both…
Do robots vote? Do machines make decisions instead of us? No, (at least not yet), but this is something that could happen. The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on democracy is a complex issue that requires thorough research and…
Defying the median voter theorem, party polarization has spread globally, especially in the United States. As concerns grow over its risks to democracy, political science has probed its causes, revealing two paradoxes: while polarization…
Coalition forming is investigated among countries, which are coupled with short range interactions, under the influence of external fields produced by the existence of global alliances. The model rests on the natural model of coalition…
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…
Political polarization, fueled by public discourse and echo chambers, threatens the foundation of democratic elections. However, traditional one-dimensional opinion models -- assuming ``support for one party equals opposition to another''…
Polarization of societies is getting more and more attention from researchers working at the intersection of many fields, because it seems to be a defining feature of many public domains. In this paper, we are going to investigate how the…
Disease outbreaks force the governments to rapid decisions to deal with. However, the rapid stream of decision-making could be costly in terms of the democratic representativeness. The aim of the paper is to investigate the trade-off…
Social polarization is a growing concern worldwide, as it strains social relations, erodes trust in institutions, and thus threatens democratic societies. Academic efforts to understand this phenomenon have traditionally approached it from…
Social media provides an extended space for collective action, as netizens leverage it as a tool for claim-making and for demanding the dividends of governance. However, political regimes often greet expanding use of social media with…
People are influenced by the choices of others, a phenomenon observed across contexts in the social and behavioral sciences. Social influence can lock in an initial popularity advantage of an option over a higher quality alternative. Yet…
This study quantifies influence between media outlets by applying a novel methodology that uses causal effect estimation on networks and transformer language models. We demonstrate the obscured influence of state-controlled outlets over…