Abstract
We present a model showing the evolution of an organization of agents who discuss democratically about good practices. This model feeds on a field work we did for about twelve years in France where we followed NPOs, called AMAPs, and observed their construction through time at the regional and national level. Most of the hypothesis we make here are either based on the literature on opinion diffusion or on the results of our field work. By defining dynamics where agents influence each other, make collective decision at the group level, and decide to stay in or leave their respective groups, we analyse the effect of different forms of vertical communication that is meant to spread good practices within the organization. Our main indicators of the good functioning of the democratic dynamics are stability and representativeness. We show that if communication about norms is well designed, it has a positive impact on both stability and representativeness. Interestingly the effect of communication increases with the number of dimensions discussed in the groups. Communication about norms is thus a valuable tool to use in groups that wish to improve their democratic practices without jeopardizing stability.
Highlights
Targeted: communication that is designed to influence few people but to be very convincing. We model it the following way: if the norm is inside the uncertainty threshold the agent adopts the norms, if the norm is outside the uncertainty threshold the communication has no e ect
We built an ABM to study the sensitivity of representative democracy to some aspects confluent to it that we parametrized and tested
The model we introduce in this article derives from the evolution of an NPO organization (AMAP and its regional association called Alliance Provence/Les AMAP De Provence (LADP)) we observed during our field work in which, collectively, people decided to apply very dense democratic proceedings to choose the norms they would follow
Summary
It is even more interesting that the discussion is multi-dimensional, and rather complex, and that some agents can accept to disagree on some dimensions if they agree on others This is why we observe the dynamics following two main indicators: stability (that there is not too many splits along the simulation and the organizations are at some point stable) and representativeness (that each agent can belong to a group, which values are not at odd with his). . The paper is built on an original model that has already been described and tested more thoroughly, and which sensitivity analysis can be found in Appendix G and in Barbet et al , and its basic idea can be summarized in: Agents hold multidimensional opinions about the best practices to implement in their organization.
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