Agent-based models are versatile tools for studying how societal opinion change, including political polarization and cultural diffusion, emerges from individual behavior. This study expands agents’ psychological realism using empirically-motivated rules governing interpersonal influence, commitment to previous beliefs, and conformity in social contexts. Computational experiments establish that...

In this paper we show that in a simple spatial model where the government is chosen under strict proportional rule, if the outcome function is a linear combination of parties’ positions, with coefficient equal to their share of votes, essentially only a two-party equilibrium exists. The two parties taking a positive number of votes are the two extremist ones. Applications of this result include...

The article considers atypical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic by Christian leaders. In a three-fold classification it first identifies retreat from civic life in resistance lock-down restrictions on places of worship, demanding reopening extreme readings rights religious freedom, and refusal mandatory mask-wearing. A second groups as ‘rebuke’ spiritual warfare approaches within prosperity g...

This paper examines how Turkish invasions into Northern Syria’s Kurdish enclave undermine US and European policy objectives. It argues that the state, obsessed with hostility, endangers American foreign policies by further destabilising war-torn Syria, facilitating empowerment of Islamist extremist groups, impeding a peaceful resolution to protracted conflict, assisting Russia’s anti-Western in...

After the fall of the Berlin Wall a common political and economic consensus emerged, not only in the West but to a considerable extent around the world. Markets and democracy, working hand in hand, would transform the world into a community of modernized, peace-loving nations. In the process, ethnic hatred, extremist fundamentalism, and other “backward” aspects of underdevelopment would be swep...

In this paper, we study the effects of introducing contrarians in a model of Opinion Dynamics where the agents have internal continuous opinions, but exchange information only about a binary choice that is a function of their continuous opinion, the CODA model. We observe that the hung election scenario still exists here, but it is weaker and it shouldn’t be expected in every election. Finally,...

This paper presents a model in which voters attempt to balance the ideological positions of their Senate representatives. Candidate positions are determined endogenously through a primary system. The median voter theorem is applied in each election to determine winning platforms based on voter preferences which may differ from their individual bliss points. Contrary to the original median voter...

We introduce the domain of preferences that are singlepeaked on a circle, which is a generalization of the wellstudied single-peaked domain. This preference restriction is useful, e.g., for scheduling decisions, and for one-dimensional decisions in the presence of extremist preferences. We give a fast recognition algorithm of this domain, provide a characterisation by finitely many forbidden su...

Strategic communication is an important asset when countering violent extremism at institutional level, whereas its objective to give emphasis internal models that function within given organizations and institutions. Internet one of the main frameworks used by extremist groups nowadays. Social media networks, such as YouTube for example, are among most forms recruit youngsters other persons jo...

The paper explores how visual affective practice is used to spread and bolster a nationalist, extremist racist ethos on the public Facebook page of anti-immigrant group, Soldiers Odin. Affective refers particular sensibility political discourse, shaped by social formations digital technologies—the contexts in which groups or communities gather, discuss act. study shows sharing responding images...