Understanding voter behaviour requires moving beyond simplistic assumptions of individual rationality. Examining social networks, peer influence, and sensitivity to prevailing trends, significantly as amplified by opinion polls, offers a more nuanced and accurate framework for analyzing electoral outcomes. Applying statistical mechanics, specifically the Ising model provides a powerful tool for exploring these dynamics and understanding the emergence of phenomena like the "split society" phase.
Abstract:
In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events is the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such extensive collections of diverse individuals. Many sociophysics models reproduce the emergence of collective human behaviour with interacting agents, which respond to their environment according to simple rules modulated by random fluctuations. A paragon of this class is the Ising model, which, when interactions are strong, predicts that order can emerge from a chaotic initial state. In contrast with many elections, however, this model favours a substantial majority. Here, we introduce a new element to this classical theory, which accounts for the influence of opinion polls on the electorate. This brings about a new phase in which two groups divide their opinion equally. These political camps are spatially segregated, and the sharp boundary that separates them makes the system size-dependent, even in the limit of a large electorate. Election data show that, over the last 30 years, countries with more than a million voters often found themselves in this state, whereas elections in smaller countries yielded more consensual results. This transition hinges on the electorate's awareness of the general opinion.
More information: O. Devauchelle et al., Dislike of general opinion makes for tight elections, Physical Review E (2024). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.109.044106. On arXiv: DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2402.12207
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