title: Dual modeling of political opinion networks.
abstract: We present the result of a dual modeling of opinion networks. The model complements the agent-based opinion models by attaching to the social agent (voters) network a political opinion (party) network having its own intrinsic mechanisms of evolution. These two subnetworks form a global network, which can be either isolated from, or dependent on, the external influence. Basically, the evolution of the agent network includes link adding and deleting, with the opinion changes influenced by social validation, the political climate, the attractivity of the parties, and the interaction between them. The opinion network is initially composed of numerous nodes representing opinions or parties that are located on a one dimensional axis according to their political positions. The mechanism of evolution includes union, splitting, change of position, and attractivity, taking into account the pairwise node interaction decaying with node distance in power law. The global evolution ends in a stable distribution of the social agents over a quasistable and fluctuating stationary number of remaining parties. Empirical study on the lifetime distribution of numerous parties and vote results is carried out to verify numerical results.
authors: LUNAM Université, ISMANS, Laboratoire de Physique Statistique et Systémes Complexes, 44 Avenue, F.A. Bartholdi, FR-72000, Le Mans, France. wangr@ismans.fr
authors: R
authors: R
authors: Wang
authors: Q A
authors: QA
authors: Wang