Poor decisions and selfish behaviors give rise to seemingly intractable global problems, such as the lack of transparency in democratic processes, the spread of conspiracy theories, and the rise in greenhouse gas emissions. However, people are more predict ...
We study the phenomenon of intransitivity in models of dice and voting. First, we follow a recent thread of research for n-sided dice with pairwise ordering induced by the probability, relative to 1/2, that a throw from one die is higher than the other. We ...
Scholarly studies and common accounts of national politics enjoy pointing out the resilience of ideological divides among populations. Building on the image of political cleavages and geographic polarization, the regionalization of politics has become a tr ...
In this dissertation, I address the political and moral geography of Swiss federal participatory votes for the period between 1981 and 2014 to re-investigate some of the fundamental questions left open in urban sciences: how and why socio-ethical, moral an ...
Social buttons are now widespread in social media apps. They are used to assign weight to user content and trigger user engagement. They come in different shapes (e.g., thumb in Facebook, arrows in Reddit or StackOverflow, plus one in Google+) but very lit ...
In this thesis, we explore the application of data mining and machine learning techniques to several practical problems. These problems have roots in various fields such as social science, economics, and political science. We show that computer science tec ...
Switzerland has a long tradition of direct democracy, which makes it an ideal laboratory for research on real-world politics. Similar to recent open government initiatives launched worldwide, the Swiss government regularly releases datasets related to stat ...
We consider online predictions of vote results, where regions across a country vote on an issue under discussion. Such online predictions before and during the day of the vote are useful to media agencies, polling institutes, and political parties, e.g., t ...
