How Stable is Democracy ? Suggestions from Artificial Social Networks
will be at the lower left , with high degree and low preferential attachment . Networks least democratic in both regards will be at the upper right , with a low degree and high preferential attachment .
How does opinion volatility correlate with the democracy or anti-democracy of a network ? Using 100-node networks , we introduce a background belief change in 5 % of the nodes at each
10 th iteration over 10,000 . The percentage of cases in which the result is greater than 7.5 % change in beliefs across the networks we count as the frequency of volatility . Figure 8 shows results in which we average frequency results over 100 runs for each combination of mean degree and preferential exponent .
What is immediately clear from Figure 8 is that networks democratic in the sense of low preferential attachment
Figure 8 . Frequency of volatility across democratic and anti-democratic networks . 97