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Clout, activists and budget: The road to presidency

Political campaigns involve, in the simplest case, two competing campaign groups which try to obtain a majority of votes. We propose a novel mathematical framework to study political campaign dynamics on social networks whose constituents are either political activists or persuadable individuals. Ac...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Böttcher, Lucas, Herrmann, Hans J., Gersbach, Hans
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5832241/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29494627
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193199
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author Böttcher, Lucas
Herrmann, Hans J.
Gersbach, Hans
author_facet Böttcher, Lucas
Herrmann, Hans J.
Gersbach, Hans
author_sort Böttcher, Lucas
collection PubMed
description Political campaigns involve, in the simplest case, two competing campaign groups which try to obtain a majority of votes. We propose a novel mathematical framework to study political campaign dynamics on social networks whose constituents are either political activists or persuadable individuals. Activists are convinced and do not change their opinion and they are able to move around in the social network to motivate persuadable individuals to vote according to their opinion. We describe the influence of the complex interplay between the number of activists, political clout, budgets, and campaign costs on the campaign result. We also identify situations where the choice of one campaign group to send a certain number of activists already pre-determines their victory. Moreover, we show that a candidate’s advantage in terms of political clout can overcome a substantial budget disadvantage or a lower number of activists, as illustrated by the US presidential election 2016.
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spelling pubmed-58322412018-03-23 Clout, activists and budget: The road to presidency Böttcher, Lucas Herrmann, Hans J. Gersbach, Hans PLoS One Research Article Political campaigns involve, in the simplest case, two competing campaign groups which try to obtain a majority of votes. We propose a novel mathematical framework to study political campaign dynamics on social networks whose constituents are either political activists or persuadable individuals. Activists are convinced and do not change their opinion and they are able to move around in the social network to motivate persuadable individuals to vote according to their opinion. We describe the influence of the complex interplay between the number of activists, political clout, budgets, and campaign costs on the campaign result. We also identify situations where the choice of one campaign group to send a certain number of activists already pre-determines their victory. Moreover, we show that a candidate’s advantage in terms of political clout can overcome a substantial budget disadvantage or a lower number of activists, as illustrated by the US presidential election 2016. Public Library of Science 2018-03-01 /pmc/articles/PMC5832241/ /pubmed/29494627 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193199 Text en © 2018 Böttcher et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Böttcher, Lucas
Herrmann, Hans J.
Gersbach, Hans
Clout, activists and budget: The road to presidency
title Clout, activists and budget: The road to presidency
title_full Clout, activists and budget: The road to presidency
title_fullStr Clout, activists and budget: The road to presidency
title_full_unstemmed Clout, activists and budget: The road to presidency
title_short Clout, activists and budget: The road to presidency
title_sort clout, activists and budget: the road to presidency
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5832241/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29494627
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193199
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