114 - Your Vote Brings Democratic Stability

In this episode, Haley talks with Yaneer Bar-Yam, President of the New England Complex Systems Institute, and Alexander Siegenfeld, a PhD physics student at MIT, about their collaborative research paper entitled: Negative Representation and Instability in Democratic Elections. They each discuss why the current political climate in the U.S. is so polarized and unstable and explore how low voter turnout leads to negative representation and further instability. Describing insights from their research, they share the importance of increasing voter turnout and weakening the two party system (through methods like ranked choice voting) in order to achieve a more stable democracy.