Universal scaling laws in metro area election results

Eszter Bokányi, Zoltán Szállási and Gábor Vattay

PLOS ONE, 2018, vol. 13, issue 2, 1-11

Abstract: We explain the anomaly of election results between large cities and rural areas in terms of urban scaling in the 1948–2016 US elections and in the 2016 EU referendum of the UK. The scaling curves are all universal and depend on a single parameter only, and one of the parties always shows superlinear scaling and drives the process, while the sublinear exponent of the other party is merely the consequence of probability conservation. Based on the recently developed model of urban scaling, we give a microscopic model of voter behavior in which we replace diversity characterizing humans in creative aspects with social diversity and tolerance. The model can also predict new political developments such as the fragmentation of the left and the immigration paradox.

Date: 2018
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0192913 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 92913&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0192913

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0192913

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().