Electoral forecasting is an ongoing scientific challenge with high social impact, as current data-driven methods try to efficiently combine statistics with economic indices and machine learning. However, recent studies in network science pinpoint towards the importance of temporal characteristics in the diffusion of opinion. As such, we combine concepts of micro-scale opinion dynamics and temporal epidemics, and develop a novel macro-scale temporal attenuation (TA) model, which uses pre-election poll data to improve forecasting accuracy. Our hypothesis is that the timing of publicizing opinion polls plays a significant role in how opinion oscillates, especially right before elections. Thus, we define the momentum of opinion as a temporal function which bounces up when opinion is injected in a multi-opinion system of voters, and dampens during states of relaxation. We validate TA on survey data from the US Presidential Elections between 1968-2016, and TA outperforms statistical methods, as well the best pollsters at their time, in 10 out of 13 presidential elections. We present two different implementations of the TA model, which accumulate an average forecasting error of 2.8-3.28 points over the 48-year period. Conversely, statistical methods accumulate 7.48 points error, and the best pollsters accumulate 3.64 points. Overall, TA offers increases of 23-37% in forecasting performance compared to the state of the art. We show that the effectiveness of TA does not drop when relatively few polls are available; moreover, with increasing availability of pre-election surveys, we believe that our TA model will become a reference alongside other modern election forecasting techniques.
Transmitting messages in the most efficient way as possible has always been one of politicians main concerns during electoral processes. Due to the rapidly growing number of users, online social networks have become ideal platforms for politicians to interact with their potential voters. Exploiting the available potential of these tools to maximize their influence over voters is one of politicians actual challenges. To step in this direction, we have analyzed the user activity in the online social network Twitter, during the 2011 Spanish Presidential electoral process, and found that such acti…
The dynamics and influence of fake news on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election remains to be clarified. Here, we use a dataset of 171 million tweets in the five months preceding the election day to identify 30 million tweets, from 2.2 million users, which contain a link to news outlets. Based on a classification of news outlets curated by www.opensources.co, we find that 25% of these tweets spread either fake or extremely biased news. We characterize the networks of information flow to find the most influential spreaders of fake and traditional news and use causal modeling to unco…
We use a method based on machine learning, big-data analytics, and network theory to process millions of messages posted in Twitter to predict election outcomes. The model has achieved accurate results in the current Argentina primary presidential election on August 11, 2019 by predicting the large difference win of candidate Alberto Fernandez over president Mauricio Macri; a result that none of the traditional pollsters in that country was able to predict, and has led to a major bond market collapse. We apply the model to the upcoming Argentina presidential election on October 27, 2019 yieldi…
This paper studies an integrated system of political and economic systems from a systematic perspective to explore the complex interaction between them, and specially analyzes the case of the US presidential election forecasting. Based on the signed association networks of industrial structure constructed by economic data, our framework simulates the diffusion and evolution of opinions during the election through a kinetic model called the Potts Model. Remarkably, we propose a simple and efficient prediction model for the US presidential election, and meanwhile inspire a new way to model the e…
Twitter as a new form of social media potentially contains useful information that opens new opportunities for content analysis on tweets. This paper examines the predictive power of Twitter regarding the US presidential election of 2012. For this study, we analyzed 32 million tweets regarding the US presidential election by employing a combination of machine learning techniques. We devised an advanced classifier for sentiment analysis in order to increase the accuracy of Twitter content analysis. We carried out our analysis by comparing Twitter results with traditional opinion polls. In addit…
Accounting for undecided and uncertain voters is a challenging issue for predicting election results from public opinion polls. Undecided voters typify the uncertainty of swing voters in polls but are often ignored or allocated to each candidate in a simple, deterministic manner. Historically this may have been adequate because the undecided were comparatively small enough to assume that they do not affect the relative proportions of the decided voters. However, in the presence of high numbers of undecided voters, these static rules may in fact bias election predictions from election poll auth…
In the US 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama was elected as the 44th president of United States, winning the 53% of popular votes and 68% of electoral votes; in the election of 2000, Al Gore lost the election receiving 49 % of electoral votes, although he had more popular votes. It is generally believed that the electoral votes and the popular votes are correlated; however the detailed quantitative relationship for these two quantities is unclear. Here, we found an interesting relationship between fractions of electoral votes and fractions of popular votes in the presidential elections o…
The last decade has witnessed an explosion on the computational power and a parallel increase of the access to large sets of data (the so called Big Data paradigm) which is enabling to develop brand new quantitative strategies underpinning description, understanding and control of complex scenarios. One interesting area of application concerns fraud detection from online data, and more particularly extracting meaningful information from massive digital fingerprints of electoral activity to detect, a posteriori, evidence of fraudulent behavior. In this short article we discuss a few quantitativ…
At the tipping point, it is known that small incident can trigger dramatic societal shift. Getting early-warning signals for such changes are valuable to avoid detrimental outcomes such as riots or collapses of nations. However, it is notoriously hard to capture the processes of such transitions in the real-world. Here, we demonstrate the occurrence of a major shift in public opinion in the form of political support. Instead of simple swapping of ruling parties, we study the regime shift of a party popularity based on its attractiveness by examining the American presidential elections during 1…
Social media has become an emerging alternative to opinion polls for public opinion collection, while it is still posing many challenges as a passive data source, such as structurelessness, quantifiability, and representativeness. Social media data with geotags provide new opportunities to unveil the geographic locations of users expressing their opinions. This paper aims to answer two questions: 1) whether quantifiable measurement of public opinion can be obtained from social media and 2) whether it can produce better or complementary measures compared to opinion polls. This research proposes…
This aim of this article is to explore the potential use of Wikipedia page view data for predicting electoral results. Responding to previous critiques of work using socially generated data to predict elections, which have argued that these predictions take place without any understanding of the mechanism which enables them, we first develop a theoretical model which highlights why people might seek information online at election time, and how this activity might relate to overall electoral outcomes, focussing especially on how different types of parties such as new and established parties mig…
Despite many examples to the contrary, most models of elections assume that rules determining the winner will be followed. We present a model where elections are solely a public signal of the incumbent popularity, and citizens can protests against leaders that do not step down from power. In this minimal setup, rule-based alternation of power as well as "semi-democratic" alternation of power independent of electoral rules can both arise in equilibrium. Compliance with electoral rules requires there to be multiple equilibria in the protest game, where the electoral rule serves as a focal point …
The 2004 US Presidential Election cycle marked the debut of Internet-based media such as blogs and social networking websites as institutionally recognized features of the American political landscape. Using a longitudinal sample of all DNC/RNC-designated blog-citation networks we are able to test the influence of various strategic, institutional, and balance-theoretic mechanisms and exogenous factors such as seasonality and political events on the propensity of blogs to cite one another over time. Capitalizing on the temporal resolution of our data, we utilize an autoregressive network regres…
Mass Media outlets have occupied the central role of the political scenario, and are persuasive in the process of opinion formation of the citizens. In particular, the study of the relationship between Mass Media and behaviour of citizens can be monitored during election times, given the accessibility of news related to the candidates and polls that precede the election's day. In this paper we present a novel two-dimensional data driven Mass Media model based on semantic analysis of newspapers and national election surveys, which we use to analyse how a single influence mechanism should behave…
In the United States electoral system, a candidate is elected indirectly by winning a majority of electoral votes cast by individual states, the election usually being decided by the votes cast by a small number of "swing states" where the two candidates historically have roughly equal probabilities of winning. The effective value of a swing state in deciding the election is determined not only by the number of its electoral votes but by the frequency of its appearance in the set of winning partitions of the electoral college. Since the electoral vote values of swing states are not identical, …
A national voting population, when segmented into groups like, for example, different states, can yield a counter-intuitive scenario where the winner may not necessarily get the most number of total votes. A recent example is the 2016 presidential election in the US. We model the situation by using interacting opinion dynamics models and look at the effect of coarse graining near the critical points where the spatial fluctuations are high. We establish that the sole effect of coarse graining, which mimics the `winner takes all' electoral college system in the US, can give rise to finite probab…
The electoral college of voting system for the US presidential election is analogous to a coarse graining procedure commonly used to study phase transitions in physical systems. In a recent paper, opinion dynamics models manifesting a phase transition, were shown to be able to explain the cases when a candidate winning more number of popular votes could still lose the general election on the basis of the electoral college system. We explore the dependence of such possibilities on various factors like the number of states and total population (i.e., system sizes) and get an interesting scaling …
Recent accounts from researchers, journalists, as well as federal investigators, reached a unanimous conclusion: social media are systematically exploited to manipulate and alter public opinion. Some disinformation campaigns have been coordinated by means of bots, social media accounts controlled by computer scripts that try to disguise themselves as legitimate human users. In this study, we describe one such operation occurred in the run up to the 2017 French presidential election. We collected a massive Twitter dataset of nearly 17 million posts occurred between April 27 and May 7, 2017 (Ele…
Electoral systems are subject of study for physicist and mathematicians in last years given place to a new area: sociophysics. Based on previous works of the author on the Mexican electoral processes in the new millennium, he found three characteristics appearing along the 2000 and 2006 preliminary dataset offered by the electoral authorities, named PREP: I) Error distributions are not Gaussian or Lorentzian, they are characterized for power laws at the center and asymmetric lobes at each side. II) The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) presented a change in the slope of the percentage…
Predicting X from Twitter is a popular fad within the Twitter research subculture. It seems both appealing and relatively easy. Among such kind of studies, electoral prediction is maybe the most attractive, and at this moment there is a growing body of literature on such a topic. This is not only an interesting research problem but, above all, it is extremely difficult. However, most of the authors seem to be more interested in claiming positive results than in providing sound and reproducible methods. It is also especially worrisome that many recent papers seem to only acknowledge those studi…
Assessment of Socioeconomic Determinants of Voting Patterns: A Spatio-Temporal and Multinomial Logits Analysis of the 2023 Nigerian Presidential Election
This study uses the semantic brand score, a novel measure of brand importance in big textual data, to forecast elections based on online news. About 35,000 online news articles were transformed into networks of co-occurring words and analyzed by combining methods and tools from social network analysis and text mining. Forecasts made for four voting events in Italy provided consistent results across different voting systems: a general election, a referendum, and a municipal election in two rounds. This work contributes to the research on electoral forecasting by focusing on predictions based on…
On the basis of a formula for calculating seat shares and natural thresholds in multidistrict elections under the Jefferson-D'Hondt system and a probabilistic model of electoral behavior based on Pólya's urn model, we propose a new model of the relationship between the district magnitude and the number / effective number of relevant parties. We test that model on both electoral results from multiple countries employing the D'Hondt method (relatively small number of elections, but wide diversity of political configurations) and data based on hundreds of Polish local elections (large number of e…
The Presidential Election in Mexico of July 2012 has been the third time that PREP, Previous Electoral Results Program works. PREP gives voting outcomes based in electoral certificates of each polling station that arrive to capture centers. In previous ones, some statistical regularities had been observed, three of them were selected to make predictions and were published in \texttt{arXiv:1207.0078 [physics.soc-ph]}. Using the database made public in July 2012, two of the predictions were completely fulfilled, while, the third one was measured and confirmed using the database obtained upon req…
A sociophysical model for opinion dynamics is shown to embody a series of recent western hung national votes all set at the unexpected and very improbable edge of a fifty-fifty score. It started with the Bush-Gore 2000 American presidential election, followed by the 2002 Stoiber-Schrőder, then the 2005 Schrőder-Merkel German elections, and finally the 2006 Prodi-Berlusconi Italian elections. In each case, the country was facing drastic choices, the running competing parties were advocating very different programs and millions of voters were involved. Moreover, polls were given a substantial ma…
Constituency Optimisation Through Hamiltonian Representation Of Mandates (COTHROM): Algorithmic Redistricting of Irish Election Boundaries
The Problem Solving Association C.L.G.（问题解决协会C.L.G.）；School of Mathematics, Trinity College Dublin（都柏林圣三一大学数学学院）；School of Engineering, Trinity College Dublin（都柏林圣三一大学工程学院）；School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin（都柏林圣三一大学物理学院）
A new viewpoint on electoral involvement is proposed from the study of the statistics of the proportions of abstentionists, blank and null, and votes according to list of choices, in a large number of national elections in different countries. Considering 11 countries without compulsory voting (Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Spain and Switzerland), a stylized fact emerges for the most populated cities when one computes the entropy associated to the three ratios, which we call the entropy of civic involvement of the electorate. The distribution…
A dual approach to proving electoral fraud using statistics and forensic evidence (Dvojnoe dokazatel'stvo falsifikazij na vyborah statistikoj i kriminalistikoj)
In this study, we propose a mechanical model of a plurality election based on a mean field voter model. We assume that there are three candidates in each electoral district, i.e., one from the ruling party, one from the main opposition party, and one from other political parties. The voters are classified as fixed supporters and herding (floating) voters with ratios of $1-p$ and $p$, respectively. Fixed supporters make decisions based on their information and herding voters make the same choice as another randomly selected voter. The equilibrium vote-share probability density of herding voters…
Here we perform a statistical analysis of the official data from recent Russian parliamentary and presidential elections (held on December 4th, 2011 and March 4th, 2012, respectively). A number of anomalies are identified that persistently skew the results in favour of the pro-government party, United Russia (UR), and its leader Vladimir Putin. The main irregularities are: (i) remarkably high correlation between turnout and voting results; (ii) a large number of polling stations where the UR/Putin results are given by a round number of percent; (iii) constituencies showing improbably low or (i…
A distinction in reasons and motives for choosing a particular political leader establishes the key difference between older and young democracy. The former is based on electoral history, while the latter is based on feelings and personal attitude. Besides, a comparatively abundant number of political figures (persons or parties and associations) is specific for young democracies. The problem of a reference votes' distribution is analyzed. Lefevbre's theory of a reflexive control is supposed to make the basis for indifferent choice of political figures. This theory yields a golden section spli…
Based on an agent based model of opinion changes, described in detail in a recent paper (\arXiv:1507.00126), we attempt to predict, three months in advance, the range of possible results of the Polish parliamentary elections, scheduled for October 25, 2015. The model reproduces semi-quantitatively the poll results for the three parties which dominated the recent presidential elections and allows estimation of some variations of the electoral propaganda campaigns by the parties.
Vote processes are the results of several complex interactions which are hard to separate in order to understand its role in the final result. The revocatory exercise performed in Mexico in 2022 allows an approximation to the Mexican dynamics of vote. Being a binary election (in principle) and the vote was mainly due to the political party in the government and the coercion of vote we have mainly only two dynamics of vote. In this work I report that the vote distribution for the NO at urn scale is similar to the one that appears in several elections for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (P…
