Partisan Attitudes and Voting Behaviors: An Agent-based Modeling Approach

• Main Authors: Wen-Heng Chung, 鍾文衡
• Other Authors: Chuen-Tsai Sun
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/67252498134419065795

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 資訊科學與工程研究所 === 96 === Throughout the course of history, it is easily observable that certain methods could easily persuade voters and results a victory, while the very same methods might fail under a different socio-economic circumstance. A simulation model that could take the following criteria into considerations would be valuable to stakeholders of campaign planners of political parties: (a) the opinion formations of the constituents (b) the campaign strategies of the competing political groups. This study employs the paradigm of agent-based modeling, and adopts and extends an opinion dynamics model, Bounded Confidence model. The model is used to investigate the influence between individual agents and their collective behaviors. The model is extended in this study by introducing the following extensions: (a) the election candidates are modelled as a special class of agents with different power and campaign tactics (b) the voters are modelled as agents with an extra attribute of the affinity toward each political party. Different simulations of this model are conducted to investigate the relationships between voters and candidates under different configurations. The model provides a testbed of election campaign strategies and could serve as an analysis tool for empirical field studies.