Persuasion, Betrayal and Regret in Election Campaigns

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel epidemiology-inspired model for election campaigns that captures persuasion, betrayal, and regret, explaining how these factors influence election outcomes and the impact of voter abstention.

Contribution

The paper presents a new compartmental model for election campaigns incorporating persuasion, betrayal, and regret, with both deterministic and stochastic analyses.

Findings

Voter abstention increases outcome fluctuations.

The model explains controversial election results.

Decision to not vote amplifies campaign unpredictability.

Abstract

Elections play a fundamental role in democratic societies, however they are often characterized by unexpected results. Here we discuss an election campaign model inspired by the compartmental epidemiology, and we show that the model captures the main characteristics of an election campaign: persuasion, betrayal and regret. All of these three factors can be used together or independently to influence the campaign, and to determine the winner. We include results for both the deterministic and the stochastic versions of the model, and we show that the decision to not vote significantly increases the fluctuations in the model, amplifying the chance of controversial results, in agreement with the well known "paradox of not voting".