Is the Voter Model a Model for Voters
Condensed Matter journal club
Is the Voter Model a Model for Voters
- Event time: 11:30am
- Event date: 9th May 2014
- Speaker: Professor Richard Blythe (School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Edinburgh)
- Location: Room 2511, James Clerk Maxwell Building (JCMB) James Clerk Maxwell Building Peter Guthrie Tait Road Edinburgh EH9 3FD GB
Event details
Abstract
The voter model has been studied extensively as a paradigmatic opinion dynamics model. However, its ability to model real opinion dynamics has not been addressed. We introduce a noisy voter model (accounting for social influence) with recurrent mobility of agents (as a proxy for social context), where the spatial and population diversity are taken as inputs to the model. We show that the dynamics can be described as a noisy diffusive process that contains the proper anisotropic coupling topology given by population and mobility heterogeneity. The model captures statistical features of U.S. presidential elections as the stationary vote-share fluctuations across counties and the long-range spatial correlations that decay logarithmically with the distance. Furthermore, it recovers the behavior of these properties when the geographical space is coarse grained at different scales - from the county level through congressional districts, and up to states. Finally, we analyze the role of the mobility range and the randomness in decision making, which are consistent with the empirical observations.PRL 112 article 158701 (2014)
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Authors
Juan Fernández-Gracia, Krzysztof Suchecki, José J. Ramasco, Maxi San Miguel, Víctor M Eguíluz
About Condensed Matter journal club
Given the diversity of research in the CM group, chosen topics vary widely. We tend to stick to high-impact journals - Nature, Science, PNAS and PRL have been popular - but this is not prescriptive..