Re: Modeling the Emergence of Political Parties

[glen e. p. ropella]

Cool model, Darren!

I only have one modeling question:  When you say:

       Then, we let the coalitions move towards the closest agent that
       is not already a member.  And, we let agents (coalitions and
       voters) defect to the closest coalition.

Why is this in the model?  The 4 postulates you list at the
top don't seem to justify the ability to move the platform
off the "center of gravity" of the coalition.

I have a bunch of implementation questions; but, they're not
all that important.  The one that might be interesting is:
Did you give any consideration to issues that might not
be mappable onto a vector space?  In other words, in the model,
issue 1 is, to some extent, independent of issue 2.  But,
in most situations, the space isn't so well-behaved.  For
example, I can imagine that moderates sit in a kind of
gravity well near the origin in an "issue-space", if you
will, whereas those who hold immoderate opinions on one
or two issues are more sensitive to subtle changes in
issues on which they do hold moderate opinions.  I.e.
there might be a kind of annulus about the origin where
the issues are highly volatile.  In any case, these are the
thoughts that your model allows me to have. [grin]

Any chance you'll publish the source?

glen

--
glen e. p. ropella =><= Feeding the hamster wheel.  Hail Eris!
Home: http://www.trail.com/~gepr                (505) 424-0448
Work: http://www.swarm.com                      (505) 995-0818


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