A mathematical model of the pressure of an extreme ideology on a society

Extreme behavior is produced by small groups, but affects a large amount of people. The fear, the usual strategy of these groups, influences the decisions of the whole population. In this paper we propose a dynamical mathematical model to study the ideological evolution of the population in a region where some groups want to get political goals through violence. After a classification of the subpopulations using data from votes obtained by political parties in general elections, model parameters have been estimated and future tendencies are studied. c © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.