Mathematics is our “invisible culture” (Hammond 1978). Few people have any idea how much mathematics lies behind the artifacts and accoutrements of modern life. Nothing we use on a daily basis—houses, automobiles, bicycles, furniture, not to mention cell phones, computers, and Palm Pilots—would be possible without mathematics. Neither would our economy nor our democracy: national defense, Socia...

Voting, or more generally, aggregating preferences, makes systems complex. Consequently, their dynamics can be chaotic and hence difficult to predict or control. These statements are equally true for artificial multi-agent systems as for real political systems, counterindicating unreflexive use of such tools by policy makers. Similar analysis applies to systems with a continuum of alternatives,...

Equally it is not unusual to come across door-to-door sale agents working in couples rather than on an individual basis. In democratic electoral campaigns, small groups (typically couples) of political party activists may visit, door-to-door, potential electors and seek to gain their votes. Trade union movements often try to coordinate their actions in order to strengthen their position against...

Negativity towards the institutions of formal politics is currently a concern across much of the democratic world. It is generally agreed that such negativity increased among British citizens during the second half of the twentieth century. In this paper, we analyse a novel dataset not previously used to study this topic: Mass Observation's General Election diaries. Since diarists wrote mostly ...

This study focuses on the capacity of the Internet for strengthening political activism. The first part summarizes debates about these issues in the previous literature. This study starts from the premise that political activism is a multidimensional phenomenon and that we need to understand how different channels of participation relate to the social and political characteristics of the online...