相关论文: Physics peeks into the ballot box

Causality and the relativity of simultaneity seem at odds with the apparently sudden, acausal state-vector changes ("collapses") characteristic of quantum phenomena. The problem of how physical phenomena can be causally determined, have the…

This paper provides a general method for defining a generalized quantum observable (or POVM) that supplies properly normalized conditional probabilities for the time of occurrence (i.e., of detection). This method treats the time of…

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…

Since Downs proposed that the act of voting is irrational in 1957, myriad models have been proposed to explain voting and account for observed turnout patterns. We propose a model in which partisans consider both the instrumental and…

Wavepackets in quantum mechanics spread and the Universe in cosmology expands. We discuss a formalism where the two effects can be unified. The basic assumption is that the Universe is determined by a unitarily evolving wavepacket defined…

We prove an analogue of the classical ballot theorem that holds for any random walk in the range of attraction of the normal distribution. Our result is best possible: we exhibit examples demonstrating that if any of our hypotheses are…

Quantum statistics have a profound impact on the properties of systems composed of identical particles. In this Letter, we demonstrate that the quantum statistics of a pair of identical massive particles can be probed by a direct…

In light of the classic impossibility results of Arrow and Gibbard and Satterthwaite regarding voting with ordinal rules, there has been recent interest in characterizing how well common voting rules approximate the social optimum. In order…

We investigate general probabilistic theories in which every mixed state has a purification, unique up to reversible channels on the purifying system. We show that the purification principle is equivalent to the existence of a reversible…

Some distinguished types of voters, as vetoers, passers or nulls, as well as some others, play a significant role in voting systems because they are either the most powerful or the least powerful voters in the game independently of the…

We consider two-alternative elections where voters' preferences depend on a state variable that is not directly observable. Each voter receives a private signal that is correlated to the state variable. Voters may be "contingent" with…

In the months leading up to political elections in the United States, forecasts are widespread and take on multiple forms, including projections of what party will win the popular vote, state ratings, and predictions of vote margins at the…

Arrows of time - thermodynamical, cosmological, electromagnetic, quantum mechanical, psychological - are basic properties of Nature. For a quantum system-bath closed system the de-correlated initial conditions and no-memory (Markovian)…

Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…

Analysis of vote distributions using current tools from statistical physics is of increasing interest. While data considered for physics studies are subject to a careful understanding of error sources, such analysis are almost absent in…

In almost every election cycle, the validity of the United States Electoral College is brought into question. The 2016 Presidential Election again brought up the issue of a candidate winning the popular vote but not winning the Electoral…

Elections repeat commonly after a fixed time interval, ranging from months to years. This results in limitations on governance since elected candidates or policies are difficult to remove before the next elections, if needed, and allowed by…

In the modern quantum mechanics of cosmology observers are physical systems within the universe. They have no preferred role in the formulation of the theory nor in its predictions of third person probabilities of what occurs. However,…

We observe the outcome of the discrete time noisy voter model at a single vertex of a graph. We show that certain pairs of graphs can be distinguished by the frequency of repetitions in the sequence of observations. We prove that this…

General relativity is a mathematical model that uses sophisticated geometry to describe simple physics. It agrees with experiment in the few tests that can be made, but the whole edifice is not physics. Instead of using observations to test…