Related papers: A small-area ecological approach for estimating vo…
We investigated the impact of female politicians on waste collection in Italian municipalities in different territories observed over the years 2010-2019. We used a staggered difference-in-differences design to obtain a causal…
Different voters behave differently, different governments make different decisions, or different organizations are ruled differently. Many research questions important to political scientists concern choice behavior, which involves dealing…
Strong positive feedback is considered a necessary condition to observe abrupt shifts of ecosystems. A few previous studies have shown that demographic noise -- arising from the probabilistic and discrete nature of birth and death processes…
Using sample surveys as a cost effective tool to provide estimates for characteristics of interest at population and sub-populations (area/domain) level has a long tradition in "small area estimation". However, the existence of outliers in…
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…
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…
Environmental processes resolved at a sufficiently small scale in space and time will inevitably display non-stationary behavior. Such processes are both challenging to model and computationally expensive when the data size is large.…
In the coevolving voter model, each voter has one of two diametrically opposite opinions, and a voter encountering a neighbor with the opposite opinion may either adopt it or rewire the connection to another randomly chosen voter sharing…
The roll calls of the Italian Parliament in the XVI legislature are studied by employing multidimensional scaling, hierarchical clustering, and network analysis. In order to detect changes in voting behavior, the roll calls have been…
To make informed decisions in natural environments that change over time, humans must update their beliefs as new observations are gathered. Studies exploring human inference as a dynamical process that unfolds in time have focused on…
We study the effect of strategic behavior in iterative voting for multiple issues under uncertainty. We introduce a model synthesizing simultaneous multi-issue voting with Meir, Lev, and Rosenschein (2014)'s local dominance theory and…
In this paper we investigate the spatio-temporal dynamics of obesity rates across Italian regions from 2010 to 2022, aiming to identify spatial and temporal trends and assess potential heterogeneities. We implement a Bayesian hierarchical…
Knowing and modelling the migration phenomena and especially the social and economic consequences have a theoretical and practical importance, being related to their consequences for development, economic progress (or as appropriate,…
We develop a minimalist compartmental model to study the impact of mobility restrictions in Italy during the Covid-19 outbreak. We show that an early lockdown shifts the epidemic in time, while that beyond a critical value of the lockdown…
We investigate an extension of the voter model in which voters are equipped with an individual inertia to change their opinion. This inertia depends on the persistence time of a voter's current opinion (ageing). We focus on the case of only…
Ensuring legislative accountability in multi-party systems requires quantitative tools that reveal actual voting behavior beyond formal party affiliations. We present a network-based framework for analyzing parliamentary dynamics at…
We model voting behaviour in the multi-group setting of a two-tier voting system using sequences of de Finetti measures. Our model is defined by using the de Finetti representation of a probability measure (i.e. as a mixture of…
We study the voter model dynamics in the presence of confidence and bias. We assume two types of voters. Unbiased voters whose confidence is indifferent to the state of the voter and biased voters whose confidence is biased towards a common…
Ecosystems tend to fluctuate around stable equilibria in response to internal dynamics and environmental factors. Occasionally, they enter an unstable tipping region and collapse into an alternative stable state. Our understanding of how…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…