Related papers: A small-area ecological approach for estimating vo…
A sociophysical model for opinion dynamics is shown to embody a series of recent western hung national votes all set at the unexpected and very improbable edge of a fifty-fifty score. It started with the Bush-Gore 2000 American presidential…
Assuming X is a random vector and A a non-invertible matrix, one sometimes need to perform inference while only having access to samples of Y = AX. The corresponding likelihood is typically intractable. One may still be able to perform…
When doing impact evaluation and making causal inferences, it is important to acknowledge the heterogeneity of the treatment effects for different domains (geographic, socio-demographic, or socio-economic). If the domain of interest is…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
Individuals often make different decisions when faced with the same context, due to personal preferences and background. For instance, judges may vary in their leniency towards certain drug-related offenses, and doctors may vary in their…
The effects of the so-called "refugee crisis" of 2015-16 continue to dominate the political agenda in Europe. Migration flows were sudden and unexpected, leaving governments unprepared and exposing significant shortcomings in the field of…
The election control problem through social influence asks to find a set of nodes in a social network of voters to be the starters of a political campaign aiming at supporting a given target candidate. Voters reached by the campaign change…
The time evolution of the response of electors to political life is analyzed for the Italian Republic over a 70 years span in which 18 political elections have taken place. The basis for the performed analyses are the official data…
Elections play a fundamental role in democratic societies, however they are often characterized by unexpected results. Here we discuss an election campaign model inspired by the compartmental epidemiology, and we show that the model…
The drastic effect of local alliances in three-party competition is investigated in democratic hierarchical bottom-up voting. The results are obtained analytically using a model which extends a sociophysics frame introduced in 1986…
Most of the conventional models for opinion dynamics mainly account for a fully local influence, where myopic agents decide their actions after they interact with other agents that are adjacent to them. For example, in the case of social…
It is well known that no reasonable voting rule is strategyproof. Moreover, the common Plurality rule is particularly prone to strategic behavior of the voters and empirical studies show that people often vote strategically in practice.…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
Analysing age-specific mortality, fertility, and migration patterns is a crucial task in demography with significant policy relevance. In practice, such analysis is challenging when studying a large number of subpopulations, due to small…
The standard three-state voter model is enlarged by including the outside pressure favouring one of the three choices and by adding some biased internal random noise. The Monte Carlo simulations are motivated by states with the population…
We present a multivariate hierarchical space-time model to describe the joint series of monthly extreme temperatures and amounts of rainfall. Data are available for 360 monitoring stations over 60 years, with missing data affecting almost…
Migration phenomena and all the related issues, like integration of different social groups, are intrinsically complex problems since they strongly depend on several competitive mechanisms as economic factors, cultural differences and many…
We consider a problem of ecological inference, in which individual-level covariates are known, but labeled data is available only at the aggregate level. The intended application is modeling voter preferences in elections. In Rosenman and…
In political campaigning substantial resources are spent on voter mobilization, that is, on identifying and influencing as many people as possible to vote. Campaigns use statistical tools for deciding whom to target ("microtargeting"). In…