Related papers: Contrarian Deterministic Effect: the "Hung Electio…
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…
In recent months the figure of Greta Thunberg and the theme of climate changings quickly became the focus of the debate. This has lead to a polarization effect in opinion forming about the climate subject. Starting from the analysis of this…
We assume a community whose members adopt one of two opinions $A$ or $B$. Each member appears as an inflexible, or as a non-contrarian or contrarian floater. An inflexible sticks to its opinion, whereas a floater may change into a floater…
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,…
Interest in how democracies form consensus has increased recently, with statistical physics and economics approaches both suggesting that there is convergence to a fixed point in belief networks, but with fluctuations in opinions when there…
We investigate the dynamics of the majority-rule opinion formation model when voters experience differential latencies. With this extension, voters that just adopted an opinion go into a latent state during which they are excluded from the…
The influence of contrarians on the noisy voter model is studied at the mean-field level. The noisy voter model is a variant of the voter model where agents can adopt two opinions, optimistic or pessimistic, and can change them by means of…
We study a stochastic model of anonymous influence with conformist and anti-conformist individuals. Each agent with a `yes' or `no' initial opinion on a certain issue can change his opinion due to social influence. We consider anonymous…
The combined effects of collective beliefs and individual stubbornness in the dynamic of a public debate are investigated using the Galam sequential probabilistic model of opinion dynamics. The study is focused on pair interactions for…
A society of agents, with ideological positions, or "opinions" measured by real values ranging from $-\infty$ (the "far left") to $+\infty$ (the "far right"), is considered. At fixed (unit) time intervals agents repeatedly reconsider and…
The effects of interpersonal interactions on individual's agreements result in a social aggregation process which is reflected in the formation of collective states, as for instance, groups of individuals with a similar opinion about a…
A sociophysical model for opinion dynamics is shown to embody a series of recent western hung national votes all set at the unexpected and very improbable edge of a fifty-fifty score. It started with the Bush-Gore 2000 American presidential…
The connection between contradictory public opinions, heterogeneous believes and the emergence of democratic or dictatorial extremism is studied extending our former two state dynamic opinion model. Agents are attached to a social-cultural…
Imitative and contrarian behaviors are the two typical opposite attitudes of investors in stock markets. We introduce a simple model to investigate their interplay in a stock market where agents can take only two states, bullish or bearish.…
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 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…
Political polarization, fueled by public discourse and echo chambers, threatens the foundation of democratic elections. However, traditional one-dimensional opinion models -- assuming ``support for one party equals opposition to another''…
Most of the conventional models for opinion dynamics mainly account for a fully local influence, where myopic agents decide their actions after they interact with other agents that are adjacent to them. For example, in the case of social…
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…
We introduce a contrarian opinion (CO) model in which a fraction p of contrarians within a group holds a strong opinion opposite to the opinion held by the rest of the group. At the initial stage, stable clusters of two opinions, A and B…