Social media are becoming increasingly important in our society and change the way people communicate, how they acquire … information, and how they form beliefs. Experts are concerned that the rise of social media may make interaction and information …. I show that when the importance of social media increases, the amount of disagreement in the society first decreases and …

represent opinion dynamics in social networks. It relies on a small set of micro-prerequisites (intra-individual balance and … stability towards a less fragmented and more manageable grouping of opinions, compared to random networks. Such macro …

social networks of 15 villages in rural Uganda, this paper develops theoretical predictions about expected cross … with actual turnout in low-salience local elections with limited media attention, though not in high-salience presidential … importance for future empirical network research: the salience of social networks may be conditional on the information …

are unlikely to emerge in a homogeneous population. The homophily index, a measure of segregation in networks with … a stochastic best response dynamic. Numerical simulations based on a variety of networks confirm that the approximate …

information about an unobservable payoff-relevant state of the world, and costless voting is essentially one about information …. For certain classes of networks, I characterize the optimal electorate. Because the optimal electorate is often a proper … subset of the full set of agents, representative democracy – even in the absence of voting costs – is often more efficient …

decisions are shared by the state, local institutions or social networks become an effective means to maintain reproduction of …

Political agents often attempt to influence elections through "troll farms" that flood social media platforms with …, societies with high-quality media are more vulnerable to electoral manipulation …

Using a natural voting experiment in Switzerland that encompasses a 160-year period (1848-2009), we investigate whether …