Network Strategies in the Voter Model

We study a simple voter model with two competing parties. In particular, we represent the case of political elections, where people can choose to support one of the two competitors or to remain neutral. People interact in a social network and their opinion depends on those of their neighbors. Therefore, people may change opinion over time, i.e., they can support one competitor or none. The two competitors try to gain the people’s consensus by interacting with their neighbors and also with other people. In particular, competitors define temporal connections, following a strategy, to interact with people they do not know, i.e., with all the people that are not their neighbors. We analyze the proposed model to investigate which network strategies are more advantageous, for the competitors, in order to gain the popular consensus. As result, we found that the best network strategy depends on the topology of the social network. Finally, we investigate how the charisma of competitors affects the outcomes of the proposed model. PACS numbers: 89.75.-k, 89.65.-s, 89.75.Fb ∗ [email protected] 1 ar X iv :1 31 1. 59 33 v1 [ ph ys ic s. so cph ] 2 3 N ov 2 01 3