Modeling the nonlinear effects of opinion kinematics in elections: A simple Ising model with random field based study

Abstract

Inspired by partisan competitions and contentious elections in democratic countries, we numerically explore the effect of campaign strategies and related factors on the opinion of an electorate. The nature of the electorate is modeled through agents with different behaviors, such as, being conformist, contrarian or inflexible. The agents are assumed to take discrete opinion values that depend on both internal and external influences. The inhomogeneity of external influence on individuals is modeled as a random field. Two types of electorates have been considered. In an electorate with only conformist agents short-duration high impact campaigns are highly effective. These are, however, also sensitive to perturbations at the local level modeled as inflexibles and/or absentees. In electorates with both conformist and contrarian agents and varying level of dominance due to local factors, short-term campaigns are effective only in the case of fragile dominance of a single party. Strong local dominance is relatively difficult to influence and long term campaigns with strategies aimed to impact local level politics are seen to be more effective.