Opinion dynamics: Rise and fall of political parties

By E. Ben-Naim. 2004

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyze the evolution of political organizations using a model in which agents change their opinions via two competing mechanisms. Two agents may interact and reach consensus, and additionally, individual agents may spontaneously change their opinions by a random, diffusive process. We find three distinct possibilities. For strong diffusion, the distribution of opinions is uniform and no political organizations (parties) are formed. For weak diffusion, parties do form and furthermore, the political landscape continually evolves as small parties merge into larger ones. Without diffusion, a pattern develops: parties have the same size and they possess equal niches. These phenomena are analyzed using pattern formation and scaling techniques.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/81779a606f810e090cb7bcdba903cede247fffbd

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In Sociology and Political Science

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Heterophilious Dynamics Enhances Consensus (2013, background): “Self-organized dynamics is found in many other areas, from pedestrian and traffic dynamics [64, 92], social networks and economics [48, 66, 69, 77, 83], complex networks [5, 44, 91], and opinion dynamics [7, 23, 42, 49, 50, 63, 75, 105, 110, 109], all the way to applications in marketing [2, 3], pro”
Fokker–Planck equations in the modeling of socio-economic phenomena (2017, background): “Likewise, the dynamics of opinion formation in a multi-agent society has received growing attention.(12,13,14,15,19,20,21,34,41,46,52,53,54,55,91,96) In view of the relation between parameters in the microscopic interaction rules, the society develops a certain steady macroscopic opinion distributio”
Kinetic models of opinion formation (2006, background): “As we shall present in the next section, however, the formation of an asymptotic profile for the opinion is linked to the first balance [1].”
Statistical physics of social dynamics (2007, background): “Interactions are binary, and the opinions of the interacting pair of agents vary according to a compromise strategy à la Deffuant, combined with the possibility of opinion diffusion, following the original idea (Ben-Naim, 2005) discussed in Sec.”