Related papers: Sociophysics: A review of Galam models

Consider a community where initially, each individual is positive or negative regarding a reform proposal. In each round, individuals gather randomly in fixed rooms of different sizes, and all individuals in a room agree on the majority…

In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…

This article is concerned with the bottom-up hierarchical system and public debate model proposed by Galam, as well as a spatial version of the public debate model. In all three models, there is a population of individuals who are…

We analyse a generalisation of the Galam model of binary opinion dynamics in which iterative discussions take place in local groups of individuals and study the effects of random deviations from the group majority. The probability of a…

Recent decades have seen a rise in the use of physics methods to study different societal phenomena. This development has been due to physicists venturing outside of their traditional domains of interest, but also due to scientists from…

The availability of electoral data in electronic format allowed to physicist and mathematicians their own analysis. Beyond theoretical models for electoral processes, new regularities had been found in the data analysis of many countries…

I give an overview of the topic of this special issue, the applications of (statistical) physics to social sciences at large. I discuss several examples of simple social models put forward by physicists and discuss their interest. I argue…

Uncertainty persists over how and why some countries become democratic and others do not, or why some countries remain democratic and others 'backslide' toward autocracy. Furthermore, while scholars generally agree on the nature of…

Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…

Political polarization is perceived as a threat to democracies. Using the Galam model of opinion dynamics deployed in a five-dimensional parameter space, I show that polarization is the byproduct of an essential hallmark of a vibrant…

The present review is based on the lectures that the author had been giving during several years at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). Being bounded by lecture frames, the selection of the material, by…

Various aspects of recent sociophysics research are shortly reviewed: Schelling model as an example for lack of interdisciplinary cooperation, opinion dynamics, combat, and citation statistics as an example for strong interdisciplinarity.

We introduce a model of temporal evolution of political opinions which amounts to a dynamical extension of Galam model in which the proportions of inflexibles are treated as dynamical variables. We find that the critical value of…

Social physics is the application of ideas, concepts and tools from physics to study social phenomena. In this article, we present a mechanical theory underlying a mathematical treatment of social physics. We explore the possibility of…

A most debated topic of the last years is whether simple statistical physics models can explain collective features of social dynamics. A necessary step in this line of endeavour is to find regularities in data referring to large scale…

I study the conditions under which a democratic dynamics of a public debate drives a Minority-to-Majority transition. A landscape of the opinion dynamics is thus built using the Galam Majority Model (GMM) in a 3-dimensional parameter space…

Social physics is an active and diverse field in which many scientists with formal training in physics study a broad class of complex social phenomena. Social physics investigates societal problems but most often does not count on the…

The model of Bonabeau et al explains social hierarchies as random: People keep a memory of recent fights, and winners have a higher probability to win again. The question of phase transition and the generalization from square lattices to…

Human dynamics and sociophysics build on statistical models that can shed light on and add to our understanding of social phenomena. We propose a generative model based on a stochastic differential equation that enables us to model the…

We study spatiotemporal regularities of electoral results and turnout rates for each municipality (or polling station) concerning French elections between 1992 and 2007. We try to account for the data using models based on a simple…