Math & Stats Club Talk

Political parties under stress: when does bias outweigh consensus?

Malindi Whyte, Graduate Student – WFU
Thursday, February 23; 2:00 PM in Manchester 018
Refreshments will be served.

Political parties emerge in models for the evolution of opinions among a population when people compromise, that is, change their opinion to the numerical average after a dialogue. In the bounded confidence model, compromise is strictly limited to people with similar opinions. Over time, one observes the emergence of stationary opinion clusters, political parties, with predictable inter-party spacing, without interaction or compromise between different parties. We study the effect of adding bias on this model, with drift of opinions towards one end of the political spectrum, either spontaneous or triggered by interaction within parties. We quantify the drift of parties with bias, the loss of members in parties as they drift, the formation of new parties, and more complex dynamics as bias increases.