How Stable is Democracy ? Suggestions from Artificial Social Networks
Figure 7 . Different patterns of opinion volatility stimulated by a background change in a small percentage of nodes .
background noise : at regular intervals , we make a small percentage of random agents change their opinions . In what follows we have a random 5 % of the agents in a network change their opinions every tenth generation . We think of this as a background rate of spontaneous belief-change by some percentage of individuals in the network .
The measure we are after , however , is what impact that background rate of belief change will have on the
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