Related papers: Application of Statistical Physics to Politics
The relationship between thermodynamics and statistical physics is valid in the thermodynamic limit - when the number of particles becomes very large. Here, we study thermodynamics in the opposite regime - at both the nano scale, and when…
In this paper, I introduce a novel stability axiom for stochastic voting rules, called self-equivalence, by which a society considering whether to replace its voting rule using itself will choose not to do so. I then show that under the…
In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…
A method is described to probe high-scale physics in lower-energy experiments by employing sum rules in terms of renormalisation group invariants. The method is worked out in detail for the study of supersymmetry-breaking mechanisms in the…
I study the conditions under which a democratic dynamics of a public debate drives a Minority-to-Majority transition. A landscape of the opinion dynamics is thus built using the Galam Majority Model (GMM) in a 3-dimensional parameter space…
In many proportional parliamentary elections, electoral thresholds (typically 3-5%) are used to promote stability and governability by preventing the election of parties with very small representation. However, these thresholds often result…
A multicanonical formalism is applied to the problem of statistical equilibrium in a complex system with a hierarchy of dynamical structures. At the small scales the system is in quasi-equilibrium and follows a Maxwell-Boltzmann…
There is a paradox in the model of social dynamics determined by voting in a stochastic environment (the ViSE model) called "pit of losses." It consists in the fact that a series of democratic decisions may systematically lead the society…
The results of the renormalization group are commonly advertised as the existence of power law singularities near critical points. The classic predictions are often violated and logarithmic and exponential corrections are treated on a…
Voting and assignment are two of the most fundamental settings in social choice theory. For both settings, random serial dictatorship (RSD) is a well-known rule that satisfies anonymity, ex post efficiency, and strategyproofness. Recently,…
Majorisation, also called rearrangement inequalities, yields a type of stochastic ordering in which two or more distributions can be compared. In this paper we argue that majorisation is a good candidate as a theory for uncertainty. We…
Proportional representation plays a crucial role in electoral systems. In ordinal elections, where voters rank candidates based on their preferences, the Single Transferable Vote (STV) is the most widely used proportional voting method. STV…
We develop a scaling theory and a renormalization technique in the context of the modern theory of polarization. The central idea is to use the characteristic function (also known as the polarization amplitude) in place of the free energy…
The renormalization method is specifically aimed at connecting theories describing physical processes at different length scales and thereby connecting different theories in the physical sciences. The renormalization method used today is…
We introduce and study a generalization of majorization called relative submajorization and show that it has many applications to the resource theories of thermodynamics, bipartite entanglement, and quantum coherence. In particular, we show…
Typicality arguments replace the postulated mixed state ensembles of statistical mechanics with pure states sampled uniformly at random, explaining why most microstates of large systems exhibit thermal behavior. This paradigm has been…
Majority voting is one of the few black-box interventions that can improve a fixed stochastic predictor: repeated access can be cheaper than changing a high-capability model. Classical fixed-competence theory makes this intervention look…
Uncertainty persists over how and why some countries become democratic and others do not, or why some countries remain democratic and others 'backslide' toward autocracy. Furthermore, while scholars generally agree on the nature of…
Consider a community where initially, each individual is positive or negative regarding a reform proposal. In each round, individuals gather randomly in fixed rooms of different sizes, and all individuals in a room agree on the majority…
We argue that statistical mechanics of systems with relaxation implies breaking the energy function of systems into two having different transformation rules. With this duality the energy approach incorporates the generalized vortex forces.…