Scaling and universality in proportional elections

Details Scaling and universality in proportional elections Scaling and universality in proportional elections

2006-12-14

arxiv.org/abs/physics/0612140v2

Physical Review Letters 99, 138701 (2007)

Physics

Physics and Society

4 pages, 3 figures. Title and abstract changed, new introduction, empirical analysis thoroughly described, new figure added. F

Scientific paper

10.1103/PhysRevLett.99.138701

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 endeavour is to find regularities in data referring to large scale social phenomena, such as scaling and universality. We show that, in proportional elections, the distribution of the number of votes received by candidates is a universal scaling function, identical in different countries and years. This finding reveals the existence in the voting process of a general microscopic dynamics that does not depend on the historical, political and/or economical context where voters operate. A simple dynamical model for the behaviour of voters, similar to a branching process, reproduces the universal distribution.

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