Democratic Thwarting of Majority Rule in opinion dynamics: 1. Unavowed Prejudices versus Contrarians

TL;DR

This paper investigates how unintentional prejudices and contrarian behaviors influence the outcome of democratic opinion dynamics, revealing that initial minority opinions can become majority through specific parameter conditions, challenging democratic fairness.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of opinion dynamics using the Galam Majority Model, highlighting how unavowed prejudices and contrarians can predetermine election outcomes.

Findings

Large parameter domains lead minorities to become majorities without external influence.

Counterintuitive effects of prejudices and contrarians on opinion shifts.

Democratic outcomes are often predetermined by model parameters, not initial support.

Abstract

I study the conditions under which a democratic dynamics of a public debate drives a Minority-to-Majority transition. A landscape of the opinion dynamics is thus built using the Galam Majority Model (GMM) in a 3-dimensional parameter space for three different sizes r=2, 3, 4 of local discussing groups. The related parameters are (p_0, k, x), the respective proportions of initial agents supporting opinion A, unavowed tie prejudices breaking in favor of opinion A, and contrarians. Combining k and x yields unexpected and counterintuitive results. In most part of the landscape the final outcome is predetermined with a single attractor dynamics independently of the initial supports for the competing opinions. Large domains of (k, x) values are found to lead an initial minority to turn majority democratically without any external influence. A new alternating regime is also unveiled in narrow ranges of extreme proportions of contrarians. The findings indicate that the expected democratic character of free opinion dynamics is indeed rarely satisfied. The actual values of (k, x) are found to be instrumental to predetermine the final winning opinion. Therefore, the conflicting challenge for the predetermined opinion to loose, is to modify these values appropriately to become the winner. However, developing a model which could help manipulating public opinion rises ethical questions. The issue is discussed in the conclusion.