Electoral Systems

During the 2020 Winter Workshop on Complex Systems, I joined a team with Tomasz Raducha, Mateusz Wiliński, Jarosław Klamut and Roger Cremades to work on a multidisciplinary project inspired by Tomasz’ prior work with the Voter model, in which a network of voters exchange opinions according to a particular probabilistic process. In our project, we simulate how different electoral systems that are used in practice result in outcomes that are representative of the state of the opinions in the network. We extend the voter model with rules to mimic zealots who never change their opinion, and media susceptibility within the opinion dynamics simulation. In order to mimic districts as they occur in district-based electoral systems, we use the stochastic block model.

In 2021, we organized a satellite workshop Democracy out of the balance - a Networks Perspective under the umbrella of the Networks conference.