Regensburg 2013 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 10: Opinion Formation I

SOE 10.4: Vortrag

Dienstag, 12. März 2013, 11:00–11:15, H37

Modeling spatial patterns in voting behavior — •Juan Fernandez-Gracia, Krystof Suchecki, Jose J. Ramasco, Victor M. Eguiluz, and Maxi San Miguel — IFISC, Palma de Mallorca, Spain

A very rich set of results has been derived from different opinion models. Nevertheless this theoretical efforts require at some point a confrontation with empirical data, which has been mostly elusive. The difficulty of designing social experiments is certainly one of the reasons. Nevertheless the present big data paradigm should help us in this direction. We claim that election data is a rich source of data for contrasting opinion models.

We try to fill the gap between theory and observations by testing the voter model as a model for voters. We develop a metapopulation framework for the voter model which incorporates the mobility patterns that are available from commuting data. Furthermore using real data on commuting behavior and population sizes incorporates to the model the non trivial heterogeneities found in real demographic data. We contrast the results of the model with features of election results and find that certainly the voter model is able to explain spatial features observed in real elections.