Related papers: Voter Turnouts Govern Key Electoral Statistics
An important aspect of AI design and ethics is to create systems that reflect aggregate preferences of the society. To this end, the techniques of social choice theory are often utilized. We propose a new social choice function motivated by…
We hypothesize that if election results are manipulated or forged, then, due to the well-known human attraction to round numbers, the frequency of reported round percentages can be increased. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed raw data…
We introduce a voting model that is similar to a Keynesian beauty contest and analyze it from a mathematical point of view. There are two types of voters-copycat and independent-and two candidates. Our voting model is a binomial…
Nowadays there is an increasing interest of physicists in finding regularities related to social phenomena. This interest is clearly motivated by applications that a statistical mechanical description of the human behavior may have in our…
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,…
Recently, scholars from law and political science have introduced metrics which use only election outcomes (and not district geometry) to assess the presence of partisan gerrymandering. The most high-profile example of such a tool is the…
A voting bloc is defined to be a group of voters who have similar voting preferences. The cleavage of the Irish electorate into voting blocs is of interest. Irish elections employ a ``single transferable vote'' electoral system; under this…
Successful attempts to predict judges' votes shed light into how legal decisions are made and, ultimately, into the behavior and evolution of the judiciary. Here, we investigate to what extent it is possible to make predictions of a…
I derive the probability that a vote cast in an Instant Runoff Voting election will change the election winner. I phrase that probability in terms of the candidates' expected vote totals, and then I estimate its magnitude for different…
We consider a two-round election model involving $m$ voters and $n$ candidates. Each voter is endowed with a strict preference list ranking the candidates. In the first round, the candidates are partitioned into two subsets, $A$ and $B$,…
The median voter theorem has long been the default model of voter behavior and candidate choice. While contemporary work on the distribution of political opinion has emphasized polarization and an increasing gap between the "left" and the…
Elections employ various voting systems to determine winners based on voters' preferences. However, many recent ranked-choice elections have forced voters to truncate their ballots by only ranking a subset of the candidates. This study…
Correlation and similarity measures are widely used in all the areas of sciences and social sciences. Often the variables are not numbers but are instead qualitative descriptors called categorical data. We define and study similarity…
The voter model and the Axelrod model are two of the main stochastic processes that describe the spread of opinions on networks. The former includes social influence, the tendency of individuals to become more similar when they interact,…
We propose new methods of electoral statistics. With their help, we study transcripts of vote counting in municipal elections. We construct and apply effective statistical tests to detect the ballot stuffing at the level of individual…
A recently proposed graph-theoretic metric, the influence gap, has shown to be a reliable predictor of the effect of social influence in two-party elections, albeit only tested on regular and scale-free graphs. Here, we investigate whether…
The only acceptable form of polling in the multi-billion dollar survey research field utilizes representative samples. We argue that with proper statistical adjustment, non-representative polling can provide accurate predictions, and often…
Many networks do not live in isolation but are strongly interacting, with profound consequences on their dynamics. Here, we consider the case of two interacting social networks and, in the context of a simple model, we address the case of…
For centuries, it has been widely believed that the influence of a small coalition of voters is negligible in a large election. Consequently, there is a large body of literature on characterizing the likelihood for an election to be…
Consider Plurality with random tie-breaking. This paper uses standard axiomatic extensions of preferences over elements to preferences over sets (Kelly, Gardenfors, Responsiveness) to characterize all better-replies of a voter under…