Is the Voter Model a model for voters?

TL;DR

This paper introduces a noisy voter model incorporating social influence and mobility, effectively capturing US election vote-share fluctuations and spatial correlations across different geographical scales.

Contribution

It extends the traditional voter model by including social mobility and heterogeneity, providing a realistic framework for opinion dynamics and election analysis.

Findings

The model reproduces statistical features of US presidential elections.

It captures long-range spatial correlations decaying logarithmically.

Mobility range and decision randomness align with empirical data.

Abstract

The voter model has been studied extensively as a paradigmatic opinion dynamics' model. However, its ability for modeling real opinion dynamics has not been addressed. We introduce a noisy voter model (accounting for social influence) with agents' recurrent mobility (as a proxy for social context), where the spatial and population diversity are taken as inputs to the model. We show that the dynamics can be described as a noisy diffusive process that contains the proper anysotropic coupling topology given by population and mobility heterogeneity. The model captures statistical features of the US presidential elections as the stationary vote-share fluctuations across counties, and the long-range spatial correlations that decay logarithmically with the distance. Furthermore, it recovers the behavior of these properties when a real-space renormalization is performed by coarse-graining the geographical scale from county level through congressional districts and up to states. Finally, we analyze the role of the mobility range and the randomness in decision making which are consistent with the empirical observations.