相关论文: Physics peeks into the ballot box

Election data represent a precious source of information to study human behavior at a large scale. In proportional elections with open lists, the number of votes received by a candidate, rescaled by the average performance of all…

A most debated topic of the last years is whether simple statistical physics models can explain collective features of social dynamics. A necessary step in this line of endeavour is to find regularities in data referring to large scale…

Elections for public offices in democratic nations are large-scale examples of collective decision-making. As a complex system with a multitude of interactions among agents, we can anticipate that universal macroscopic patterns could emerge…

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…

Contributing to the toolbox for interpreting election results, we evaluate the robustness of election winners to random noise. We compare the robustness of different voting rules and evaluate the robustness of real-world election winners…

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…

Divided Government is nowadays a common feature of the U.S. political system. The voters can cast partisan ballots for two political powers the executive (Presidential elections) and the legislative (the Congress election). Some recent…

Democratic societies are built around the principle of free and fair elections, that each citizen's vote should count equal. National elections can be regarded as large-scale social experiments, where people are grouped into usually large…

This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…

We study in details the turnout rate statistics for 77 elections in 11 different countries. We show that the empirical results established in a previous paper for French elections appear to hold much more generally. We find in particular…

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…

Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…

We explain the anomaly of election results between large cities and rural areas in terms of urban scaling in the 1948-2016 US elections and in the 2016 EU referendum of the UK. The scaling curves are all universal and depend on a single…

We study spatiotemporal regularities of electoral results and turnout rates for each municipality (or polling station) concerning French elections between 1992 and 2007. We try to account for the data using models based on a simple…

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…

Given a finite set $S$ of points in $\mathbb{R}^d$, which we regard as the locations of voters on a $d$-dimensional political `spectrum', two candidates (Alice and Bob) select one point in $\mathbb{R}^d$ each, in an attempt to get as many…

We study positional voting rules when candidates and voters are embedded in a common metric space, and cardinal preferences are naturally given by distances in the metric space. In a positional voting rule, each candidate receives a score…

It is shown how, given a "probability data table" for a quantum or classical system, the representation of states and measurement outcomes as vectors in a real vector space follows in a natural way. Some properties of the resulting sets of…

The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…

In this paper we propose a novel method to forecast the result of elections using only official results of previous ones. It is based on the voter model with stubborn nodes and uses theoretical results developed in a previous work of ours.…