Related papers: Scaling and universality in proportional elections
Scaling has been proposed as a powerful tool to analyze the properties of complex systems, and in particular for cities where it describes how various properties change with population. The empirical study of scaling on a wide range of…
Fundamental laws of human mobility have been extensively studied, yet we are still lacking a comprehensive understanding of the mobility patterns of sharing conveyances. Since travellers would highly probably no longer possess their own…
The interaction of all mobile species with their environment hinges on their movement patterns: the places they visit and how frequently they go there. In human society, where the prevalent form of cohabitation is in cities, the highly…
The challenge of understanding the collective behaviors of social systems can benefit from methods and concepts from physics [1-6], not because humans are similar to electrons, but because certain large-scale behaviors can be understood…
We consider a voting model, where a number of candidates need to be selected subject to certain feasibility constraints. The model generalises committee elections (where there is a single constraint on the number of candidates that need to…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
Growth patterns of complex systems predict how they change in sizes, numbers, masses, etc. Understanding growth is important, especially for many biological, ecological, urban, and socioeconomic systems. One noteworthy growth behavior is…
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Selection, the tendency of some traits to become more frequent than others in a population under the influence of some (natural or artificial) agency, is a key component of Darwinian evolution and countless other natural and social…
This article is a presentation of specific recent results describing scaling limits of individual-based models. Thanks to them, we wish to relate the time-scales typical of demographic dynamics and natural selection to the parameters of the…
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…
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The fluctuation scaling law has universally been observed in a wide variety of phenomena. For counting processes describing the number of events occurred during time intervals, it is expressed as a power function relationship between the…
Recent experiments in adult mammalian tissues have found scaling relations of the voter model in the dynamics of the genetically labeled population of stem cells. Yet, the reason for this seemingly robust appearance of the voter model…
In large asexual populations, multiple beneficial mutations arise in the population, compete, interfere with each other, and accumulate on the same genome, before any of them fix. The resulting dynamics, although studied by many authors, is…
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…
Decision procedures aggregating the preferences of multiple agents can produce cycles and hence outcomes which have been described heuristically as `chaotic'. We make this description precise by constructing an explicit dynamical system…
We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are…
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…
There is strong expectation that cities, across time, culture and level of development, share much in common in terms of their form and function. Recently, attempts to formalize mathematically these expectations have led to the hypothesis…