Intromissão na conversa

entre Pacheco Pereira e Pedro Magalhães [também serve para as acusações de populismo e eleições em geral]: Friends, not policies, win elections: Politicians have long been accused of putting popularity ahead of sound policies — but now a study by physicists in Italy suggests that this is an excellent strategy for winning elections. The researchers analysed the outcomes of five proportional-representation “open-list” elections and concluded that voters are more likely to favour candidates that other people are saying good things about, rather than those with the most appealing policies (Phys. Rev. Lett. 99 038701): "We show that, in proportional elections, the distribution of the number of votes received by candidates is a universal scaling function, identical in different countries and years. This finding reveals the existence in the voting process of a general microscopic dynamics that does not depend on the historical, political, and/or economical context where voters operate. A simple dynamical model for the behavior of voters, similar to a branching process, reproduces the universal distribution."

(via)