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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…
To assess the presence of gerrymandering, one can consider the shapes of districts or the distribution of votes. The "efficiency gap," which does the latter, plays a central role in a 2016 federal court case on the constitutionality 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…
Platforms for online civic participation rely heavily on methods for condensing thousands of comments into a relevant handful, based on whether participants agree or disagree with them. These methods should guarantee fair representation of…
The voting method, an ensemble approach for fundamental frequency estimation, is empirically known for its robustness but lacks thorough investigation. This paper provides a principled analysis and improvement of this technique. First, we…
Budget aggregation is a process in which citizens vote by declaring their individual ideal budget allocation, and a pre-determined rule aggregates all votes into a single outcome. Recent theoretical work has proposed various aggregation…
The constrained voter model describes the dynamics of opinions in a population of individuals located on a connected graph. Each agent is characterized by her opinion, where the set of opinions is represented by a finite sequence of…
Human dynamics and sociophysics suggest statistical models that may explain and provide us with better insight into social phenomena. Contextual and selection effects tend to produce extreme values in the tails of rank-ordered distributions…
The ability to measure the satisfaction of (groups of) voters is a crucial prerequisite for formulating proportionality axioms in approval-based participatory budgeting elections. Two common - but very different - ways to measure the…
In elections, the vote shares or turnout rates show a strong spatial correlation. The logarithmic decay with distance suggests that a 2D noisy diffusive equation describes the system. Based on the study of U.S. presidential elections data,…
Search engine results depend not only on the algorithms but also on how users interact with them. However, factors affecting the selection of a search query remain understudied. Using a representative survey of Swiss citizens before a round…
Given a transition matrix $P$ indexed by a finite set $V$ of vertices, the voter model is a discrete-time Markov chain in $\{0,1\}^V$ where at each time-step a randomly chosen vertex $x$ imitates the opinion of vertex $y$ with probability…
Survey weighting allows researchers to account for bias in survey samples, due to unit nonresponse or convenience sampling, using measured demographic covariates. Unfortunately, in practice, it is impossible to know whether the estimated…
We investigate the determinants of voting behavior by focusing on the direct effect of educational attainment, sociodemographic characteristics, partisan identity, and political ideology on the intention to vote, registration, and turnout.…
The question of how people vote strategically under uncertainty has attracted much attention in several disciplines. Theoretical decision models have been proposed which vary in their assumptions on the sophistication of the voters and on…
We study the contrarian voter model for opinion formation in a society under the influence of an external oscillating propaganda and stochastic noise. Each agent of the population can hold one of two possible opinions on a given issue…
We consider two-alternative elections where voters' preferences depend on a state variable that is not directly observable. Each voter receives a private signal that is correlated to the state variable. Voters may be "contingent" with…
Overestimation of turnout has long been an issue in election surveys, with nonresponse bias or voter overrepresentation identified as major sources of bias. However, adjusting for nonignorable nonresponse bias is substantially challenging.…
The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…
In this paper we consider two-opinion voter models on dynamic random graphs, in which the joint dynamics of opinions and graphs acts as one-way feedback, i.e., edges appear and disappear over time depending on the opinions of the two…