Related papers: Is the Voter Model a model for voters?
Latent factor models are widely used in the social and behavioral science as scaling tools to map discrete multivariate outcomes into low dimensional, continuous scales. In political science, dynamic versions of classical factor models have…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
We investigate a dynamical model of opinion formation in which an individual's opinion is influenced by interactions with a group of other agents. We introduce a bias towards one of the opinions in a manner not considered earlier to the…
Different voters behave differently, different governments make different decisions, or different organizations are ruled differently. Many research questions important to political scientists concern choice behavior, which involves dealing…
We introduce the confident voter model, in which each voter can be in one of two opinions and can additionally have two levels of commitment to an opinion --- confident and unsure. Upon interacting with an agent of a different opinion, a…
We study the dynamics of opinion formation in a heterogeneous voter model on a complete graph, in which each agent is endowed with an integer fitness parameter $k \ge 0$, in addition to its $+$ or $-$ opinion state. The evolution of the…
We introduce the heterogeneous voter model (HVM), in which each agent has its own intrinsic rate to change state, reflective of the heterogeneity of real people, and the partisan voter model (PVM), in which each agent has an innate and…
Opinion Dynamics models can be, for most of them, divided between discrete and continuous. They are used in different circumstances and the relationship between them is not clear. Here we will explore the relationship between a model where…
Models of ordering dynamics allow to understand natural systems in which an initially disordered population homogenizes some traits via local interactions. The simplest of these models, with wide applications ranging from evolutionary to…
Belief perseverance is the widely documented tendency of holding to a belief, even in the presence of contradicting evidence. In online environments, this tendency leads to heated arguments with users ``blocking'' each other. Introducing…
We address the link between the controllability or observability of a stochastic complex system and concepts of information theory. We show that the most influential degrees of freedom can be detected without acting on the system, by…
Complex dynamical systems driven by the unravelling of information can be modelled effectively by treating the underlying flow of information as the model input. Complicated dynamical behaviour of the system is then derived as an output.…
We investigate the coarsening kinetics in a long-range variant of the Persistent Voter Model in space dimension $d=1$ and 2. In this model agents can hold two confidence levels, normal and zealot. If normal, agents take the opinion of…
Forecasting elections -- a challenging, high-stakes problem -- is the subject of much uncertainty, subjectivity, and media scrutiny. To shed light on this process, we develop a method for forecasting elections from the perspective of…
We introduce the threshold $q$-voter opinion dynamics where an agent, facing a binary choice, can change its mind when at least $q_0$ amongst $q$ neighbors share the opposite opinion. Otherwise, the agent can still change its mind with a…
While the number and variety of models to explain opinion exchange dynamics is huge, attempts to justify the model results using empirical data are relatively rare. As linking to real data is essential for establishing model credibility,…
We consider the herding to non-herding transition caused by idiosyncratic choices or imperfect imitation in the context of the Kirman Model for financial markets, or equivalently the Noisy Voter Model for opinion formation. In these…
We propose an exactly solvable model for the dynamics of voters in a two-party system. The opinion formation process is modeled on a random network of agents. The dynamical nature of interpersonal relations is also reflected in the model,…
The Hegselmann--Krause model is a prototypical model for opinion dynamics. It models the stochastic time evolution of an agent's or voter's opinion in response to the opinion of other like-minded agents. The Hegselmann--Krause model only…
Previous explanations for the persistence of polarization of opinions have typically included modelling assumptions that predispose the possibility of polarization (i.e., assumptions allowing a pair of agents to drift apart in their opinion…