Exact Scale Invariance in Mixing of Binary Candidates in Voting Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a voting model demonstrating exact scale invariance in the distribution of vote shares among binary candidates, with implications for understanding critical phenomena in voting systems.

Contribution

It presents a novel voting model showing exact scale invariance in vote share distributions, extending previous approximate results to a precise double scaling limit.

Findings

Vote share distributions follow gamma distributions with shape parameters from initial seed votes.

Power-law relation between cumulative functions of binary candidates holds in the model.

Empirical data from horse races confirms the scale invariance predicted by the model.

Abstract

We introduce a voting model and discuss the scale invariance in the mixing of candidates. The Candidates are classified into two categories $\mu\in \{0,1\}$ and are called as `binary' candidates. There are in total $N=N_{0}+N_{1}$ candidates, and voters vote for them one by one. The probability that a candidate gets a vote is proportional to the number of votes. The initial number of votes (`seed') of a candidate $\mu$ is set to be $s_{\mu}$. After infinite counts of voting, the probability function of the share of votes of the candidate $\mu$ obeys gamma distributions with the shape exponent $s_{\mu}$ in the thermodynamic limit $Z_{0}=N_{1}s_{1}+N_{0}s_{0}\to \infty$. Between the cumulative functions $\{x_{\mu}\}$ of binary candidates, the power-law relation $1-x_{1} \sim (1-x_{0})^{\alpha}$ with the critical exponent $\alpha=s_{1}/s_{0}$ holds in the region $1-x_{0},1-x_{1}<<1$. In the double scaling limit $(s_{1},s_{0})\to (0,0)$ and $Z_{0} \to \infty$ with $s_{1}/s_{0}=\alpha$ fixed, the relation $1-x_{1}=(1-x_{0})^{\alpha}$ holds exactly over the entire range $0\le x_{0},x_{1} \le 1$. We study the data on horse races obtained from the Japan Racing Association for the period 1986 to 2006 and confirm scale invariance.