Related papers: A computational model of spatial politics: Hotelli…
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,…
Research on the causes of political polarization points towards multiple drivers of the problem, from social and psychological to economic and technological. However, political institutions stand out, because -- while capable of…
A core tension in the study of plurality elections is the clash between the classic Hotelling-Downs model, which predicts that two office-seeking candidates should position themselves at the median voter's policy, and the empirical…
Defying the median voter theorem, party polarization has spread globally, especially in the United States. As concerns grow over its risks to democracy, political science has probed its causes, revealing two paradoxes: while polarization…
Politics around the world exhibits increasing polarization, demonstrated in part by rigid voting configurations in institutions like legislatures or courts. A crux of polarization is separation along a unidimensional ideological axis, but…
We propose a new version of the spatial model of voting. Platforms of five parties are evolving in a two-dimensional landscape of political issues so as to get maximal numbers of voters. For a Gaussian landscape the evolution leads to a…
The study of complex political phenomena such as parties' polarization calls for mathematical models of political systems. In this paper, we aim at modeling the time evolution of a political system whereby various parties selfishly interact…
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…
Classical spatial models of two-party competition typically predict convergence to the median voter, yet real-world party systems often exhibit persistent and asymmetric polarization. We develop a spatial model of two-party competition in…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. By being flexible about the location or width of the center, this measure enables the researcher to analyze polarization…
We characterise multi-candidate pure-strategy equilibria in the Hotelling-Downs spatial election model for the class of best-worst voting rules, in which each voter is endowed with both a positive and a negative vote, i.e., each voter can…
Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…
The Hotelling-Downs model is a natural and appealing model for understanding strategic positioning by candidates in elections. In this model, voters are distributed on a line, representing their ideological position on an issue. Each…
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…
Explanations of polarization often rely on one of the three mechanisms: homophily, bounded confidence, and community-based interactions. Models based on these mechanisms consider the lack of interactions as the main cause of polarization.…
While we typically focus on data visualization as a tool for facilitating cognitive tasks (e.g., learning facts, making decisions), we know relatively little about their second-order impacts on our opinions, attitudes, and values. For…
Accurate modeling of opinion dynamics has the potential to help us understand polarization and what makes effective political discourse possible or impossible. Here, we use physics-based methods to model the evolution of political opinions…
The median-voter hypothesis (MVH) predicts convergence of two party platforms across a one-dimensional political spectrum during majoritarian elections. From the viewpoint of the MVH, an explanation of polarization is that each election has…
Polarization, defined as the emergence of sharply divided groups with opposing and often extreme views, is an increasingly prominent feature of modern societies. While many studies analyze this phenomenon in the context of single issues,…
It is known that individual opinions on different policy issues often align to a dominant ideological dimension (e.g. "left" vs. "right") and become increasingly polarized. We provide an agent-based model that reproduces these two stylized…