A dual modelling of evolving political opinion networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dual modeling approach for evolving political opinion networks, combining agent-based social networks with independent opinion networks, to analyze their joint evolution and stability.

Contribution

It presents a novel dual network model that captures the co-evolution of social and political opinion networks with intrinsic mechanisms, including opinion dynamics and network evolution.

Findings

Stable distribution of agents over parties achieved

Empirical validation with party lifetime and vote data

Network evolution leads to quasi-stable political configurations

Abstract

We present the result of a dual modeling of opinion network. The model complements the agent-based opinion models by attaching to the social agent (voters) network a political opinion (party) network having its own intrinsic mechanisms of evolution. These two sub-networks form a global network which can be either isolated from or dependent on the external influence. Basically, the evolution of the agent network includes link adding and deleting, the opinion changes influenced by social validation, the political climate, the attractivity of the parties and the interaction between them. The opinion network is initially composed of numerous nodes representing opinions or parties which are located on a one dimensional axis according to their political positions. The mechanism of evolution includes union, splitting, change of position and of attractivity, taken into account the pairwise node interaction decaying with node distance in power law. The global evolution ends in a stable distribution of the social agents over a quasi-stable and fluctuating stationary number of remaining parties. Empirical study on the lifetime distribution of numerous parties and vote results is carried out to verify numerical results.