Universal size effects for populations in group-outcome decision-making problems

Abstract

Elections constitute a paradigm of decision-making problems that have puzzled experts of different disciplines for decades. We study two decision-making problems, where groups make decisions that impact only themselves as a group. In both studied cases, participation in local elections and the number of democratic representatives at different scales (from local to national), we observe a universal scaling with the constituency size. These results may be interpreted as constituencies having a hierarchical structure, where each group of $N$ agents, at each level of the hierarchy, is divided in about $N^{\delta}$ subgroups with $\delta \approx 1/3$. Following this interpretation, we propose a phenomenological model of vote participation where abstention is related to the perceived link of an agent to the rest of the constituency and which reproduces quantitatively the observed data.