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Multiwinner voting rules are used to select a small representative subset of candidates or items from a larger set given the preferences of voters. However, if candidates have sensitive attributes such as gender or ethnicity (when selecting…
We present numerical simulations of a model of social influence, where the opinion of each agent is represented by a binary vector. Agents adjust their opinions as a result of random encounters, whenever the difference between opinions is…
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…
Migration's impact spans various social dimensions, including demography, sustainability, politics, economy and gender disparities. Yet, the decision-making process behind migrants choosing their destination remains elusive. Existing models…
Motivated by recent successes in model-based pre-election polling, we propose a kinetic model for opinion formation which includes voter demographics and socio-economic factors like age, sex, ethnicity, education level, income and other…
Species growing in environments that change in time and space will vary in their abundance across locations, even in the absence of persistent location preferences. Here we quantify this non-equilibrium effect by studying a minimal model of…
We explore the connection between migration patterns and emergent behaviors of evolving populations in spatially heterogeneous environments. Despite extensive studies in ecologically and medically important systems, a unifying framework…
Organisms and ecological groups accumulate evidence to make decisions. Classic experiments and theoretical studies have explored this process when the correct choice is fixed during each trial. However, we live in a constantly changing…
Many democratic countries use district-based elections where there is a "seat" for each district in the governing body. In each district, the party whose candidate gets the maximum number of votes wins the corresponding seat. The result of…
The literature on the relationship between environmental factors such as climatic changes and natural hazards and human mobility (both internal and international) is characterized by heterogeneous results: some contributions highlight the…
Using fine-grained, publicly available data, this paper studies the short-term association between environmental factors, i.e., weather and air pollution characteristics, and weekly mortality rates in small geographical regions in Europe.…
A desire to understand the decision of the UK to leave the European Union, Brexit, in the referendum of June 2016 has continued to occupy academics, the media and politicians. Using topological data analysis ball mapper we extract…
In several countries, including Italy, a prominent approach to population health surveillance involves conducting repeated cross-sectional surveys at short intervals of time. These surveys gather information on the health status 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…
Ethnic-based political inequality is widespread, yet its underlying drivers remain poorly understood. This paper shows that an ethnic group's relative size is a key correlate of its access to central executive power. Using data on 575…
This study uses the semantic brand score, a novel measure of brand importance in big textual data, to forecast elections based on online news. About 35,000 online news articles were transformed into networks of co-occurring words and…
We analyze the network of relations between parliament members according to their voting behavior. In particular, we examine the emergent community structure with respect to political coalitions and government alliances. We rely on tools…
This study introduces a statistical mechanics framework to analyze the territorial distribution of the Resident Foreign Population across Italian municipalities. The observed percentages of foreign residents are treated as the reference…
Individuals are increasingly exposed to news and opinion from beyond national borders in a world that is becoming more and more globalised. This news and opinion is often concentrated in clusters of ideological homophily such as political…
Elections constitute a paradigm of decision-making problems that have puzzled experts of different disciplines for decades. We study two decision-making problems, where groups make decisions that impact only themselves as a group. In both…