Related papers: Emergence, Evolution and Manipulation of Swing Vot…

We study the opinion dynamics in a generalized voter model in which voters are additionally influenced by two antagonistic news sources, whose effect is to promote political polarization. We show that, as the influence of the news sources…

We propose a computational framework for modeling opinion dynamics in electoral competitions that combines two realistic features: voter memory and exogenous shocks. The population is represented by a fully-connected network of agents, each…

Opinion dynamics models how the publicly expressed opinions of users in a social network coevolve according to their neighbors as well as their own intrinsic opinion. Motivated by the real-world manipulation of social networks during the…

It is known that individual opinions on different policy issues often align to a dominant ideological dimension (e.g. "left" vs. "right") and become increasingly polarized. We provide an agent-based model that reproduces these two stylized…

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…

Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…

Polarization, defined as the emergence of sharply divided groups with opposing and often extreme views, is an increasingly prominent feature of modern societies. While many studies analyze this phenomenon in the context of single issues,…

Extreme polarization can undermine democracy by making compromise impossible and transforming politics into a zero-sum game. Ideological polarization - the extent to which political views are widely dispersed - is already strong among…

Opinion dynamics concerns social processes through which populations or groups of individuals agree or disagree on specific issues. As such, modelling opinion dynamics represents an important research area that has been progressively…

This study investigates adversarial attacks conducted to distort voter model dynamics in complex networks. Specifically, a simple adversarial attack method is proposed to hold the state of opinions of an individual closer to the target…

Echo chambers and opinion polarization recently quantified in several sociopolitical contexts and across different social media, raise concerns on their potential impact on the spread of misinformation and on openness of debates. Despite…

Defying the median voter theorem, party polarization has spread globally, especially in the United States. As concerns grow over its risks to democracy, political science has probed its causes, revealing two paradoxes: while polarization…

Many empirical networks are intrinsically pluralistic, with interactions occurring within groups of arbitrary agents. Then the agent in the network can be influenced by types of neighbors, common examples include similarity, opposition, and…

We study an opinion dynamics model that explores the competition between persuasion and compromise in a population of agents with nearest-neighbor interactions on a two-dimensional square lattice. Each agent can hold either a positive or a…

The diffusion of opinions in Social Networks is a relevant process for adopting positions and attracting potential voters in political campaigns. Opinion polarization, bias, targeted diffusion, and the radicalization of postures are key…

Opinion polarization is on the rise, causing concerns for the openness of public debates. Additionally, extreme opinions on different topics often show significant correlations. The dynamics leading to these polarized ideological opinions…

Accurate modeling of opinion dynamics has the potential to help us understand polarization and what makes effective political discourse possible or impossible. Here, we use physics-based methods to model the evolution of political opinions…

In recent years, opinion dynamics has received an increasing attention, and various models have been introduced and evaluated mainly by simulation. In this study, we introduce and study a dynamical model inspired by the so-called `bounded…

Recently, social phenomena have received a lot of attention not only from social scientists, but also from physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, in the emerging interdisciplinary field of complex system science. Opinion…

There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…