Mobilia, M orcid.org/0000-0002-1424-567X (2023) Polarization and Consensus in a Voter Model under Time-Fluctuating Influences. Physics, 5 (2). pp. 517-536. ISSN 2624-8174
Abstract
We study the effect of time-fluctuating social influences on the formation of polarization and consensus in a three-party community consisting of two types of voters (“leftists” and “rightists”) holding extreme opinions, and moderate agents acting as “centrists”. The former are incompatible and do not interact, while centrists hold an intermediate opinion and can interact with extreme voters. When a centrist and a leftist/rightist interact, they can become either both centrists or both leftists/rightists. The population eventually either reaches consensus with one of the three opinions, or a polarization state consisting of a frozen mixture of leftists and rightists. As a main novelty, here agents interact subject to time-fluctuating external influences favouring in turn the spread of leftist and rightist opinions, or the rise of centrism. The fate of the population is determined under various scenarios, and it is shown how the rate of change of external influences can drastically affect the polarization and consensus probabilities, as well as the mean time to reach the final state.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Keywords: | sociophysics; voter models; stochastic processes; polarization; consensus; mean exit time; fluctuations; noise |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Mathematics (Leeds) > Applied Mathematics (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 11 May 2023 15:40 |
Last Modified: | 16 Jan 2025 15:25 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | MPDI |
Identification Number: | 10.3390/physics5020037 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:199060 |