Parliamentary elections to the Basque Autonomous Community have a stable multi-party system that regularly produces long-lived minority and coalition governments. More amazing still, this stable party system arises in the context of a complex social and political setting in which the society...

We present a framework to analyze the relative importance of issues for the electorate. We distinguish two concepts -- issue salience and issue divisiveness -- and present those in the context of the multidimensional spatial model. Issue salience, which is widely studied in empirical and...

A group of agents has to decide whether to accept or reject a proposal. Agents vote in favor or against the proposal and, if the number of agents in favor is greater to certain quota, the proposal is accepted. The \textit{socially optimal decision} is the one adopted when all agents vote...