Exploring the entropic nature of political polarization through its formulation as a isolated thermodynamic system

Abstract

Political polarization has become an alarming trend observed in various countries. In the effort to produce more consistent simulations of the process, insights from the foundations of physics are adopted. The work presented here looks at a simple model of political polarization amongst agents which influence their immediate locality and how a entropy trace of the political discourse can be produced. From this model an isolated system representation can be formulated in respect to the changes in the entropy values across all variables of the system over simulation time. It is shown that a constant entropy value for the system can be calculated so that as the agents coalesce their opinions, the entropy trace in regards to political engagements decreases as the entropy value across non-political engagements increase. This relies upon an intrinsic constraint upon agents imposing a fixed number of activities per time point. As a result the simulation respects the second law of thermodynamics and provides insight into political polarization as a basin of entropy within an isolated system without making assumptions about external activities.

A possible thermodynamic definition and equation of state for a model of political election cycles

“…The agents of the system can partake in political discourse or other peripheral activities which are then considered to correspond to Volume and Pressure respectively. The model of political discourse used here has dynamics which drive agents to arrive at ideological consensus via local interactions ([ 14 , 23 ]). By modelling this political discourse through the thermodynamic variables, it is clear that an equation of state can be made to describe the system.…”

“…The model used in this paper is based on a previously proposed model in [ 14 ] which is a neighbor interaction model of political discourse. In this model a N × N lattice is used to describe the locations of the agents (one in each cell), with no empty cells.…”

“…Subsequent work in [ 12 ], proposes a model where the agents remain in the same spatial configuration but influence the agents in their immediate locality for their support of a political affiliation [ 13 ]. In [ 14 ] the authors present an approach to take the model of political discourse introduced in [ 12 ], and show that it is possible to monitor all the entropic components of the system state whereby showing that the system abides to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The works of [ 15 , 16 ] presents a general approach to investigating the thermodynamic quantities of that states within “Conway’s Game of Life” in which the temperature of the system is calculated.…”

Popularity and Entropy in Friendship and Enmity Networks in Classrooms

“…Researchers have looked for variables in social systems that can be susceptible to analysis using the concept of entropy [23][24][25][26]. Different entropy measures are focused on network centrality measures, which have been used in the past in many social systems [27][28][29].…”