A signed network perspective on the government formation process in parliamentary democracies

Abstract In parliamentary democracies, government negotiations talks following a general election can sometimes be a long and laborious process. In order to explain this phenomenon, in this paper we use structural balance theory to represent a multiparty parliament as a signed network, with edge sig...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Angela Fontan, Claudio Altafini
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: Nature Portfolio 2021
Materias:
R
Q
Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/f56f426196f74e17bfa65ea715ad5abc
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
Descripción
Sumario:Abstract In parliamentary democracies, government negotiations talks following a general election can sometimes be a long and laborious process. In order to explain this phenomenon, in this paper we use structural balance theory to represent a multiparty parliament as a signed network, with edge signs representing alliances and rivalries among parties. We show that the notion of frustration, which quantifies the amount of “disorder” encoded in the signed graph, correlates very well with the duration of the government negotiation talks. For the 29 European countries considered in this study, the average correlation between frustration and government negotiation talks ranges between 0.42 and 0.69, depending on what information is included in the edges of the signed network. Dynamical models of collective decision-making over signed networks with varying frustration are proposed to explain this correlation.