Abstract
Members in a social group may change over time: a new member is recruited; a current member stops his or her position; a candidate supersedes a member of the group. Here we investigate the effects of changes of nodes on the dynamics of opinion formation. In our model, opinion formation is in two stages. In the first stage, a network evolves through a voting process that is used to select agents to add into the network, to remove from the network or to be replaced by other agents. Special rules for the voting process are necessary in the first stage. We focus on two rules, namely, majority rule and random rule. In the second stage, opinion formation takes place. We find that the majority rule generally foster consensus formation in comparison to the random rule. We also investigate the effects of changes of agents on two-party systems, in which there are two parties and opinions of members in the same party are close to each other. In particular, the effects of diversity of opinions for two-party systems are studied. A counterintuitive finding is that the diversity of opinions, instead of hindering consensus formation, facilitates consensus formation.
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