Clout, Activists and Budget: The Road to Presidency

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new mathematical model to analyze how activists, budgets, and influence interact on social networks to determine election outcomes, highlighting scenarios where influence can outweigh resources.

Contribution

It develops a novel framework for understanding campaign dynamics on social networks, emphasizing the roles of activists, political clout, and budgets in election results.

Findings

Activists' influence can decisively determine election outcomes.

Political clout can outweigh budget disadvantages.

Pre-determined strategies can guarantee victory.

Abstract

Political campaigns involve, in the simplest case, two competing campaign groups which try to obtain a majority of votes. We propose a novel mathematical framework to study political campaign dynamics on social networks whose constituents are either political activists or persuadable individuals. Activists are convinced and do not change their opinion and they are able to move around in the social network to motivate persuadable individuals to vote according to their opinion. We describe the influence of the complex interplay between the number of activists, political clout, budgets, and campaign costs on the campaign result. We also identify situations where the choice of one campaign group to send a certain number of activists already pre-determines their victory. Moreover, we show that a candidate's advantage in terms of political clout can overcome a substantial budget disadvantage or a lower number of activists, as illustrated by the US presidential election 2016.