US Elections: A complex network approach

Introduction

Humans are defined by their thoughts and emotions, and their ability to express them. Opinion expression is one of the fundamentals for human interconnection, enabling communication on all levels: in a family, in a group of friends, in a public setting, on the internet, on television. It can impact just another person or a whole society, depending on the used communication media. Recent research focuses notably on understanding the key properties of human interaction and behavior as a whole, when faced with a decision problem. The greatest interest shown for the results of social science are coming from diverse fields like marketing, politics, and even warfare. Even though different in nature, all share the need to better understand human opinion expression and how it can be predicted and even controlled. While some may find such research as unethical, others understand the benefit of improving our statistical prediction systems. Medicine and marketing are two such sciences whose synergy witch social science can positively benefit society.

This study focuses on examining the voting mechanism of society and the behavior in such conditions. Markets, like politics, are systems which gather information across a group, and as a result, it is harder to clearly distinguish the two institutions. One important distinction is that voting involves a group of people (e.g. society of a country, city) which are trying to reach a decision, as fast as possible, that will represent the group as a whole. Markets do not synthesize the opinion of the group in the same way, as the opinions of the buyers are transposed implicitly into their transactions on the market. Social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, have become an important part of media, information and, ultimately, opinion expression. Their role at the beginning of the 2010s is undeniable in many forms of protest and public opinion formation. A recent example was the Arab Spring, a wave of demonstrations and protests in the Arab world which have led to the fall of regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. The protests have also used social media to organize, communicate and raise awareness despite the states’ attempts to censor the Internet. It was the first major political event in which it was admitted that social platforms have sparked and accelerated the occurring events. Most Western bloggers consider this phenomenon as a form of democratic expression, and believe that social media must work hand-in-hand in order to mobilize citizens. The simple actions of liking or adding a friend are not enough to ensure the success of a revolution. There are three ways in which social media can be helpful to social activists:

• It can mobilize protesters faster

• It can undermine a regime’s legitimacy

• It can increase national and international exposure

Understanding voting networks

What information could objectively predict the outcome of tight elections? If the elections are not tight, then we already know the outcome, it's simple. However, I've been following some close elections (50+/-2%) in the past decade, in various countries, and it seems there is a piece of information connecting that connects the dots every time. Back in 2010, when I was writing my dissertation, I was studying complex network topologies, and was aware that even the more complex mathematical models explaining how social ties form, are still barely scratching the surface in terms of realism and complexity. The small-world and scale-free models are two examples of fundamental laws of how individuals interconnect and organize themselves, while the mesh topology is as simple as it gets, useful only for proof-of-concept lab experiments.

Yet, some things are meant to be simple; simple laws seem to be embedded in the nature of social emergence for specific phenomena. Voting is one of such phenomenon. TBC