A Stability Result for Balanced Dictatorships in S-n

We prove that a balanced Boolean function on S-n whose Fourier transform is highly concentrated on the first two irreducible representations of S-n, is close in structure to a dictatorship, a function which is determined by the image or pre-image of a single element. As a corollary, we obtain a stability result concerning extremal isoperimetric sets in the Cayley graph on S-n generated by the transpositions. Our proof works in the case where the expectation of the function is bounded away from 0 and 1. In contrast, [6] deals with Boolean functions of expectation O(1/ n) whose Fourier transform is highly concentrated on the first two irreducible representations of S-n. These need not be close to dictatorships; rather, they must be close to a union of a constant number of cosets of point-stabilizers. (c) 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 46, 494-530, 2015