Modeling Political Individuals Using the Agent-Based Approach: A Preliminary Case Study on Political Experts and Their Limited Influence within Communication Networks

Agent-based modeling (ABM) has become a promising research approach in the social sciences, including economics and political science. ABM allows researchers to explore what-if questions that are not easily answered in the empirical world. As an attempt to advance cooperation between information professionals and social scientists to explore social inquiries, this paper introduces and details the design of S-RAS, an agent-based model originated from the literature of voting behavior. This paper further demonstrates an example of applying S-RAS to studying the role of political experts within communication networks. Studies in political science have identified that political experts play an important role in shaping their followers’ views. Conventional wisdom suggests that citizens in a democracy who are embedded in heterogeneous networks where they perceive a significant level of disagreement are likely to be politically tolerant. While the study of communication networks helps advance our undersanding about the foundation of democracy, it is worth extending this stream of research to ask whether the increase in the number of political experts within communication networks have meaningful effect on the pattern of preference distribution. Three experiments were conducted. Findings, implications and limits of this study, and cross-disciplinary cooperation are discussed.