Abstract
Political campaigns involve, in the simplest case, two competing campaign groups which try to obtain a majority of votes. We propose a novel mathematical framework to study political campaign dynamics on social networks whose constituents are either political activists or persuadable individuals. Activists are convinced and do not change their opinion and they are able to move around in the social network to motivate persuadable individuals to vote according to their opinion. We describe the influence of the complex interplay between the number of activists, political clout, budgets, and campaign costs on the campaign result. We also identify situations where the choice of one campaign group to send a certain number of activists already pre-determines their victory. Moreover, we show that a candidate’s advantage in terms of political clout can overcome a substantial budget disadvantage or a lower number of activists, as illustrated by the US presidential election 2016.
Highlights
Due to the advancement of network science, it has become possible to incorporate the salient features of opinion formation and spreading into large-scale network models [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
We find that a given budget might allow different choices of the number of activists, such that campaign groups find themselves in an activist-choice game
We have developed a novel framework to study political campaign dynamics on social networks based on three essential features: moving activists, political clout and campaign budgets
Summary
Due to the advancement of network science, it has become possible to incorporate the salient features of opinion formation and spreading into large-scale network models [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. The study of political mobilization is one example of such opinion dynamics, which allowed remarkable observations such as the identification of universal features in elections [8], the importance of persuadable individuals for opinion cascades [9], the impact of online social influence [10] and the necessity of social reinforcement in order to convince people [11,12,13]. A more profound understanding of political campaigns is necessary to appropriately interpret the corresponding outcomes and to possibly redesign certain aspects of campaign policies [17]. We account for the fact that mobile political activists can convince persuadable individuals under certain efficiency and cost restrictions.
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