Social Influence with Recurrent Mobility with multiple options

TL;DR

This paper extends the Social Influence with Recurrent Mobility (SIRM) model to multi-party systems, improving its mathematical robustness and enabling new election analysis applications.

Contribution

The authors generalize the SIRM model for multi-party systems, ensuring well-posedness at extreme vote shares and introducing a new calibration method for election studies.

Findings

Model now handles multi-party systems effectively

New calibration procedure enhances election analysis

Allows study of local effects and 'free will' influence

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the possible generalizations of the Social Influence with Recurrent Mobility (SIRM) model developed in Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 158701 (2014). Although the SIRM model worked approximately satisfying when US election was modelled, it has its limits: it has been developed only for two-party systems and can lead to unphysical behaviour when one of the parties has extreme vote share close to 0 or 1. We propose here generalizations to the SIRM model by its extension for multi-party systems that are mathematically well-posed in case of extreme vote shares, too, by handling the noise term in a different way. In addition, we show that our method opens new applications for the study of elections by using a new calibration procedure, and makes possible to analyse the influence of the "free will" (creating a new party) and other local effects for different commuting network topologies.