Empirical Analysis and Agent-Based Modeling of the Lithuanian Parliamentary Elections

Aleksejus Kononovicius

doi:10.1155/2017/7354642

Abstract

We analyze a parties’ vote share distribution across the polling stations during the Lithuanian parliamentary elections of 1992, 2008, and 2012. We find that the distribution is rather well fitted by the Beta distribution. To reproduce this empirical observation, we propose a simple multistate agent-based model of the voting behavior. In the proposed model, agents change the party they vote for either idiosyncratically or due to a linear recruitment mechanism. We use the model to reproduce the vote share distribution observed during the election of 1992. We discuss model extensions needed to reproduce the vote share distribution observed during the other elections.

Highlights

While any individual vote is important to determine the outcome of an election, the probability for a single vote to decide the outcome is extremely small
While the vote share distribution was mainly ignored in the previous sociophysics papers, the other statistical patterns arising during the many different elections were considered for the empirical analysis and modeling
The parliamentary election of 1992 was held in 2061 local polling stations. 17 parties competed in the parliamentary election, but only 4 of them were able to obtain more than 5% of popular vote

Summary

Introduction

While any individual vote is important to determine the outcome of an election, the probability for a single vote to decide the outcome is extremely small. During the last three decades, physicists have approached social and economic systems from this perspective, looking for universal laws and important statistical patterns, while proposing simple theoretical models to explain the empirical observations This effort by numerous more or less prominent physicists became what is known as sociophysics and econophysics [22,23,24,25,26,27]. In the political science and sociological literature, one would find numerous previous approaches to the Lithuanian parliamentary elections, for example, [36,37,38,39,40] Most of these approaches had a quite different perspective: most of these papers discuss general electoral trends in the context of social, demographic, and economic changes. While the vote share distribution was mainly ignored in the previous sociophysics papers, the other statistical patterns arising during the many different elections were considered for the empirical analysis and modeling. We end the paper with a discussion (see Section 5)

Empirical Analysis of the Data from the Lithuanian Parliamentary Elections

A Multistate Agent-Based Model of the Voting Behavior

The Modeling of the Parliamentary Election

Findings

Conclusions