Statistical physics has proven to be a fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the
realm of traditional physics. Recent years have witnessed an attempt by physicists to study …

The voter model has been studied extensively as a paradigmatic opinion dynamics model.
However, its ability to model real opinion dynamics has not been addressed. We introduce a …

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

The Sznajd model, which describes opinion formation and social influence, is treated
analytically on a complete graph. We prove the existence of the phase transition in the …

Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. Sources of
influence can be divided as external, which are independent of social context, or as …

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 endeavor is to …

The Sznajd model of socio-physics, with only a group of people sharing the same opinion
can convince their neighbors, is applied to a scale-free random network modeled by a …

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 …

We build simple computational models of belief dynamics within the framework of discrete-
spin statistical physics models, and explore how suitable they are for understanding and …

We study the statistics of turnout rates and results of the French elections since 1992. We
find that the distribution of turnout rates across towns is surprisingly stable over time. The …