Clout, activists and budget: The road to presidency

Lucas Böttcher, Hans J Herrmann and Hans Gersbach

PLOS ONE, 2018, vol. 13, issue 3, 1-11

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0193199 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 93199&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0193199

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0193199

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().