Scaling laws and universality in the choice of election candidates

TL;DR

This paper applies statistical physics concepts to analyze election candidate choices, revealing scale-free and universal patterns across multiple countries, and linking these to network properties.

Contribution

It introduces a physics-inspired framework to understand the universal scaling laws in election candidate selection, supported by empirical data from diverse elections.

Findings

Power law relationship between number of candidates and electorate size

Candidate choice exhibits multiplicative (lognormal) behavior

Universal patterns observed across 16 elections in 5 countries

Abstract

Nowadays there is an increasing interest of physicists in finding regularities related to social phenomena. This interest is clearly motivated by applications that a statistical mechanical description of the human behavior may have in our society. By using this framework, we address this work to cover an open question related to elections: the choice of elections candidates (candidature process). Our analysis reveals that, apart from the social motivations, this system displays features of traditional out-of-equilibrium physical phenomena such as scale-free statistics and universality. Basically, we found a non-linear (power law) mean correspondence between the number of candidates and the size of the electorate (number of voters), and also that this choice has a multiplicative underlying process (lognormal behavior). The universality of our findings is supported by data from 16 elections from 5 countries. In addition, we show that aspects of network scale-free can be connected to this universal behavior.