Related papers: Scaling and universality in proportional elections
Physics is based on probabilities as fundamental entities of a mathematical description. Expectation values of observables are computed according to the classical statistical rule. The overall probability distribution for one world covers…
One of the most impressive features of continuous phase transitions is the concept of universality, that allows to group the great variety of different critical phenomena into a small number of universality classes. All systems belonging to…
Turbulent flows, ubiquitous in nature and engineering, comprise fluctuations over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. While flows with fluctuations in thermodynamic variables are much more common, much less is known about these…
Statistical thermodynamics has a universal appeal that extends beyond molecular systems, and yet, as its tools are being transplanted to fields outside physics, the fundamental question, \textit{what is thermodynamics?}, has remained…
Cities are often compared through scaling laws, usually expressed as power-law relations between population size and aggregate urban quantities related to infrastructure, socioeconomic activity, or environmental impacts. These laws are…
Critical states are sometimes identified experimentally through power-law statistics or universal scaling functions. We show here that such features naturally emerge from networks in self-sustained irregular regimes away from criticality.…
How often will elections end in landslides? What is the probability for a head-to-head race? Analyzing ballot results from several large countries rather anomalous and yet unexplained distributions have been observed. We identify tactical…
Numerous models in opinion dynamics focus on the temporal dynamics within a single electoral unit (e.g., country). The empirical observations, on the other hand, are often made across multiple electoral units (e.g., polling stations) at a…
Map generalization is a process of producing maps at different levels of detail by retaining essential properties of the underlying geographic space. In this paper, we explore how the map generalization process can be guided by the…
Challenges due to the rapid urbanization of the world -- especially in emerging countries -- range from an increasing dependence on energy, to air pollution, socio-spatial inequalities, environmental and sustainability issues. Modelling the…
The power law is ubiquitous in natural and social phenomena, and is considered as a universal relationship between the frequency and its rank for diverse social systems. However, a general model is still lacking to interpret why these…
Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…
Preferences of individuals are distributions of elements generated by generalized functions. Models of economic decision-making derived from such distributions are consistent with results of physiological experiments, and explain any…
We present a detailed statistical analysis of acoustic emission time series from laboratory rock fracture obtained from different experiments on different materials including acoustic emission controlled triaxial fracture and punch-through…
We generalize the method of Van Hove so as to deal with the case of non-ordinary statistical mechanics, that being phenomena with no time-scale separation. We show that in the case of ordinary statistical mechanics, even if the adoption of…
In this communication, we propose a tentative to set the fundamental problem of measuring process done by a large structure on a microsopic one. We consider the example of voting when an entire society tries to measure globally opinions of…
Universality in the behavior of complex systems often reveals itself in the form of scale-invariant distributions that are essentially independent of the details of the microscopic dynamics. A representative paradigm of complex behavior in…
We introduce a new model of collective decision making, when a global decision needs to be made but the parties only possess partial information, and are unwilling (or unable) to first create a globalcomposite of their local views. Our…
A mass ejection model in a time-dependent random environment with both temporal and spatial correlations is introduced. When the environment has a finite correlation length, individual particle trajectories are found to diffuse at large…
Polarization is a ubiquitous phenomenon in social systems. Empirical studies document substantial evidence for opinion polarization across social media, showing a typical bipolarized pattern devising individuals into two groups with…