Abstract
When making decisions, individuals often seek advice from their family, friends, and social network connections. In this way, individuals’ opinions are susceptible to influence from their connections’ viewpoints. For example, in elections, individuals may initially support one party, while social influence may sway their choice to another. A recent study by Stewart et al. introduced a metric, influence assortment, to quantify the phenomenon of information gerrymandering that one party can influence more voters from other parties by strategically distributing their members among the social networks. While this metric correlates strongly with voting outcomes, the finding is only suitable for two-party elections. In this paper, we define the influence assortment that incorporates the level of similarity (homophily) among neighbours in the social network and extend it to multi-party elections. We examine its ability to predict voting outcomes when all parties initially have equal votes and average degrees. Through simulations using a stochastic model of voting behaviour, we demonstrate that the correlation between the influence gap and vote difference is a strong predictor in both small and large scale-free networks.
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Liu, X., Kato, S., Ren, F., Su, G., Zhang, M., Gu, W. (2023). Information Gerrymandering in Elections. In: Wu, S., Yang, W., Amin, M.B., Kang, BH., Xu, G. (eds) Knowledge Management and Acquisition for Intelligent Systems. PKAW 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14317. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7855-7_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7855-7_7
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