When Networks Mislead: How Partisan Communication Undermines Democratic Decision-Making

TL;DR

This paper uses an agent-based model to show how partisan communication networks can mislead voters, especially when strategic bluffing dominates honest signals, and suggests that central independents can mitigate collective errors.

Contribution

Introduces a novel agent-based model analyzing the impact of communication architecture and strategic bluffing on democratic decision-making.

Findings

Partisan bluffing can override honest signals in moderate candidate quality gaps.

Positioning independents centrally can prevent echo chambers from systematic error.

Small groups of extremists can cause cascading bias effects across communities.

Abstract

Democratic societies increasingly rely on communication networks to aggregate citizen preferences and information, yet these same networks can systematically mislead voters under certain conditions. We introduce an agent-based model that captures two rival forces in partisan networks: honest noise filtering that lifts accuracy and strategic bluffing that embeds bias. Extensive simulations show that communication architecture shapes voting accuracy more than any individual-level trait. When candidate quality gaps are moderate, partisan bluffing overpowers honest signals and steers supporters of weaker contenders into collective error. However, positioning independents in central network roles serves as an epistemic circuit breaker, preventing echo chambers from spiraling toward systematic error. Counterintuitively, we discover that competitive elections with meaningful quality differences prove most vulnerable to collective delusion. Small numbers of extreme partisans can contaminate entire communities through cascading bias effects that persist across hundreds of communication rounds. Our findings challenge conventional wisdom about information aggregation in democracy and provide actionable insights for institutional design in an era of algorithmic filtering and social media polarization.