Related papers: Application of Statistical Physics to Politics
Consider an election between two candidates in which the voters' choices are random and independent and the probability of a voter choosing the first candidate is $p>1/2$. Condorcet's Jury Theorem which he derived from the weak law of large…
Formalism based on equilibrium statistical thermodynamics is applied to communication networks of decision making individuals. It is shown that in statistical ensembles for choice models, properly defined disutility can play the same role…
Determining the power distribution of the members of a shareholder meeting or a legislative committee is a well-known problem for many applications. In some cases it turns out that power is nearly proportional to relative voting weights,…
Nowadays there is an increasing interest of physicists in finding regularities related to social phenomena. This interest is clearly motivated by applications that a statistical mechanical description of the human behavior may have in our…
One unexamined assumption in foreign ownership regulation is the notion that majority voting rights translate to 'effective control'. This assumption is so deeply entrenched in foreign investments law that possession of majority voting…
Recently, a morphological transition in the velocity distribution of a relativistic gas has been pointed out which shows hallmarks of a critical phenomenon. Here, we provide a general framework which allows for a thermodynamic approach to…
Opinion dynamics, the study of how individual beliefs and collective public opinion evolve, is a fertile domain for applying statistical physics to complex social phenomena. Like physical systems, societies exhibit macroscopic regularities…
We study the voting problem with two alternatives where voters' preferences depend on a not-directly-observable state variable. While equilibria in the one-round voting mechanisms lead to a good decision, they are usually hard to compute…
A voter sits on each vertex of an infinite tree of degree $k$, and has to decide between two alternative opinions. At each time step, each voter switches to the opinion of the majority of her neighbors. We analyze this majority process when…
In their seminal work, Fermi, Pasta, Ulam and Tsingou explored the connection between statistical mechanics and dynamical properties, such as chaos and ergodicity. Even today, seventy years later, the topic is not fully understood: while…
The problem of an enormously large energy density of the quantum vacuum is discussed in connection with the concept of renormalization of physical parameters in quantum field theory. Using the method of dimensional regularization, it is…
In the realm of statistical mechanics, it has been established that there is no distinction between the micro-canonical and canonical ensembles in the thermodynamic limit. However, this paradigm may alter when addressing statistical…
The statistical properties of pairwise majority voting over S alternatives is analyzed in an infinite random population. We first compute the probability that the majority is transitive (i.e. that if it prefers A to B to C, then it prefers…
We propose currently feasible experiments using small, isolated systems of ultracold atoms to investigate the effects of dynamical chaos in the microscopic onset of irreversibility. A control parameter is tuned past a critical value, then…
Randomness is a central concept to statistics and physics. Here, a statistical analysis shows experimental evidence that tossing coins and finding last digits of prime numbers are identical regarding statistics for equally likely outcomes.…
Turbulence exhibits significant velocity fluctuations even if the scale is much larger than the scale of the energy supply. Since any spatial correlation is negligible, these large-scale fluctuations have many degrees of freedom and are…
We establish an analytical criterion for dynamical thermalization within harmonic systems, applicable to both classical and quantum models. Specifically, we prove that thermalization of various observables, such as particle energies in…
Data of proportional elections show a striking feature: If the parties are ranked according to the number of their voters, the number of votes grows exponentially with the rank of the party. This so-called Zipf's law has been reported…
We compare different actual forms of democracy and analyse in which way they are variations of a 'natural consensus decision process'. We analyse how 'consensus decision followed by majority voting' is open to 'false play' by the majority,…
Conventional statistical mechanics describes large systems and averages over many particles or over many trials. But work, heat, and entropy impact the small scales that experimentalists can increasingly control, e.g., in single-molecule…