Verhulst-Lotka-Volterra (VLV) model of ideological struggles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a model combining Verhulst and Lotka-Volterra equations to analyze ideological struggles, considering external influences and agent interactions, revealing how environmental changes can prevent ideological extinction.

Contribution

It develops a novel VLV-based framework for modeling ideological dynamics, incorporating external and internal influences and analyzing their effects on ideological persistence.

Findings

Environmental changes can prevent ideological extinction.

External communication influences opinion dynamics.

Agent interactions significantly impact ideological competition.

Abstract

Let the population of e.g. a country where some opinion struggle occurs be varying in time, according to Verhulst equation. Consider next some competition between opinions such as the dynamics be described by Lotka and Volterra equations. Two kinds of influences can be used, in such a model, for describing the dynamics of an agent opinion conversion: this can occur (i) either by means of mass communication tools, under some external field influence, or (ii) by means of direct interactions between agents. It results, among other features, that change(s) in environmental conditions can prevent the extinction of populations of followers of some ideology due to different kinds of resurrection effects. The tension arising in the country population is proposed to be measured by an appropriately defined scale index.