Contrarian deterministic effects on opinion dynamics: “the hung elections scenario”

By Serge Galam. 2003

299 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the effects of contrarians on the dynamics of opinion forming using the 2-state Galam opinion dynamics model. In a single update step, groups of a given size are defined and all agents in each group adopt the state of the local majority. In the absence of contrarians, the dynamics is fast and leads to a total polarization always along the initial majority (for groups of odd sizes). The introduction of contrarians is then shown to give rise to interesting new dynamics properties. First, at low concentration a, a new mixed phase is stabilized with a coexistence of both states. This is an ordered phase with a clear cut majority–minority splitting (non zero order parameter). Second, there is a phase transition into a new disordered phase at ac=16, 0.23, 0.30…12 for groups of respective sizes 3, 5, 9 and infinite. For a⩾ac the disordered phase has no opinion dominating with both state densities equal (zero order parameter). In this phase agents keep shifting states but no global symmetry breaking, i.e., the appearance of a majority, takes place. Our results may shed a new light on the phenomenon of “hung elections” as occured in the 2000 American presidential elections and that of the 2002 German parliamentary elections.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e98df13aca1ed949f84c7bc0a4e86b0b884fd11b

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Citations in the corpus

Towards a mathematical theory of complex socio-economical systems by functional subsystems representation (2008, methodology): “Methods derived from statistical mechanics are used to analyse political, economical, and social competitions phenomena [17], [18], [21], [29].”
Statistical physics of social dynamics (2007, background): “…i.e., agents that initially take the majority opinion in a group discussion, but that right after the discussion switch to the opposite opinion (Galam, 2004; Stauffer and Sá Martins, 2004); the presence of one-sided contrarians and unsettled agents (Borghesi and Galam, 2006); the presence…”
CONTINUOUS OPINIONS AND DISCRETE ACTIONS IN OPINION DYNAMICS PROBLEMS (2007, background): “5 can be interpreted as the belief that other people are more likely to pick the worst alternative than the best one and will make an agent a contrarian [13].”
Models of Social Influence: Towards the Next Frontiers (2017, unknown): “This idea was first implemented inmodels ofmajority influence innominal opinion spaces (Galam2004;Wioet al. 2006).”