The Impact of Exchanging Opinions in Political Decision-Making on Voting by Using Multi-agent Simulation

Abstract

Representative members who make laws and heads of local governments are elected by citizens in Japan. Therefore, elections are one of the most important factors in future political or economic trends. There are a lot of researchers, such as social psychologists and political scientists, focusing on voters’ decision-making processes. It has been known that voters collect information from others or mass media to decide who to vote for. The rapid spread of information and communication technologies in recent years, such as the spread of the Internet, has increased the expansion of communication space. However, it is difficult to observe how voters make political decisions. In this paper, we propose a simulation model based on both Latane’s dynamic social impact theory (DSIT) simulation model and Riker and Ordeshook’s expected utility model of voting behavior to analyze political decision-making by using multi-agent simulation. Agents in the proposed model communicate with order utility that is based on ambiguity in communicating information. Agents are generated from a database of public opinion polls. Then, agents are given social attributes and values of political parties. The agents’ communication space is a hierarchical network constructed by agents that have the same or similar attributes. In the experiment, we compared simulation results with the actual results from voting in an experiment and examined the validity of the proposed model. Moreover, we analyzed the effect of expanding communication space on voters’ political decision-making in the experiment.