Uncovering the Social Dynamics of Online Elections

Abstract

Past work analysing elections in online domains has largely ignored the underlying social networks present in such environments. Here, the Wikipedia Re- quest for Adminship (RfA) process is studied within the context of a social network and several factors influencing different stages of the voting process are pinpointed. Machine-learning problems were formulated to test the identified factors. The different facets explored are: election participation, decision making in elections, and election outcome. Our results show that voters tend to participate in elections that their con- tacts have participated in. Furthermore, there is evidence showing that an individual's decision-making is influenced by his contacts' actions. The properties of voters within the social graph were also studied; results reveal that candidates who gain the support of an influential coalition tend to succeed in elections. Additionally, detailed analy- ses on different classes of voters and candidates were made. Finally, the structural properties corresponding to networks of election participants were analysed and these networks were found to exhibit higher degrees of community structure versus graphs of participants selected at random. Much like institutions in the real world, social media sites are often guided by a group of dedicated users who are engaged in various administrative duties. Although these sites are shaped and driven by the aggregate contributions of their users, a smaller group of dedicated users usually wield most of the power and are responsible for making decisions on issues of critical importance to these sites. One such media site is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia which has seen significant growth in terms of its content and community of users over the years of its development. Although it is collaboratively edited, its quality, based on evidences, is comparable to that of the Encyclopedia Britannica (Giles 00). This quality is maintained by its administrators who perform various maintenance tasks on its content. The administrators act as custodians of the encyclopedia A preliminary version of this work titled Voting Behavior Analysis in the Election of Wikipedia Admins appeared in proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM '11), 2011.