Elections are crucial in democracy and their results form from different mechanisms from the individual to the collective. In this paper we show how a simple model of opinion competition, the Voter Model, with a realistic social context for the agents, based on the spatial population distribution and the commuting patterns of the individuals, is capable of reproducing statistical features of election results. In particular the model is able to capture the stationarity of the dispersion of vote-share distributions and the long range logarithmic decay in correlations of vote-shares.

Is the voter model a model for voters?

J Fernández-Gracia, K Suchecki, JJ Ramasco, M San Miguel, VM Eguíluz

Physical review letters 112 (15), 158701