Entrenched time delays versus accelerating opinion dynamics: are advanced democracies inherently unstable?

Abstract

Abstract. Modern societies face the challenge that the time scale of opinion formation is continuously accelerating in contrast to the time scale of political decision making. With the latter remaining of the order of the election cycle we examine here the case that the political state of a society is determined by the continuously evolving values of the electorate. Given this assumption we show that the time lags inherent in the election cycle will inevitable lead to political instabilities for advanced democracies characterized both by an accelerating pace of opinion dynamics and by high sensibilities (political correctness) to deviations from mainstream values. Our result is based on the observation that dynamical systems become generically unstable whenever time delays become comparable to the time it takes to adapt to the steady state. The time needed to recover from external shocks grows in addition dramatically close to the transition. Our estimates for the order of magnitude of the involved time scales indicate that socio-political instabilities may develop once the aggregate time scale for the evolution of the political values of the electorate falls below 7-15 months.

Chaos in time delay systems, an educational review

“…Dynamical systems with retarded interactions constitute an active and rapidly developing research field with increasing relevance for real-world applications. An example is the proposal [58], that the time delays resulting from entrenched election cycles may contribute to destabilizing modern democracies, in particular if the presumption holds that the technological progress induces a continuously accelerating opinion dynamics.…”

“…This is a valid approximation for, e. g., optical systems, for which there is only little variation of the delay. However, biological [16] and social [58] systems may be described more accurately by time delays that are drawn from a probability distribution g(τ ),…”

“…Sect. 1.5.1) can be carried out also for distributed time delays [58], with the investigation being particularly straightforward for a g(τ ) which can be Laplace-transformed analytically [92]. A selection of delay distributions is presented in Fig.…”

“…The latter has been employed for describing the aging transition of a delay coupled network of oscillators [92] and for the delayed influences within advanced political systems. [58]. Note, that standard mode decomposition (cf.…”

Multi-choice opinion dynamics model based on Latané theory

“…Simulations of opinion dynamics [1] are core subject of sociophysics [2], an interdisciplinary field of research in complex systems directly connected to computational sociology. Numerous examples of such research are published in interdisciplinary sections of physical journals [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10], and in journals devoted to computational sociology [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. The models of opinions dynamics deals with binary (or Boolean), Ising-like [18] variables, corresponding to two-states models of opinions [19][20][21][22] or multi-state, but still discrete state opinions models [6,23] or discrete vector-like variables [7].…”