Is the Voter Model a model for voters?

Juan Fernández-Gracia1, Krzysztof Suchechki1,2, José J. Ramasco1, Maxi San Miguel1 and Victor M. Eguiluz1
1Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos IFISC (CSIC-UIB), Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
2Faculty of Physics and Center of Excellence for Complex Systems Research, Warsaw University of Technology, Koszykowa 75, 00-662 Warsaw, Poland.

(Sept 2013)

The voter model has been studied extensively as a paradigmatic opinion dynamics' model. However, its ability for modeling real opinion dynamics has not been addressed. We introduce a noisy voter model (accounting for social influence) with agents' recurrent mobility (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 anysotropic coupling topology given by population and mobility heterogeneity. The model captures statistical features of the US 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 a real-space renormalization is performed by coarse-graining the geographical scale from 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.

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