The Interaction between Heterogeneous Voting Strategies and Dynamic Vote-Seeking Campaigns: An Agent-Based Model

Political candidates in a democracy articulate positions on the issues of the day, but are also highly aware of voter sentiment on those issues, and tailor their campaigns accordingly. Voters, too, adjust their political opinions based on interactions with others in their social network. We present an agent-based simulation that models this dynamic interplay between candidates and voters, in order to shed light on what outcomes candidates can expect to result from a policy of "chasing" votes. The voters in our simulation use various decision procedures to select a candidate; these procedures are modeled on empirical results from the political science literature. Our model can thus be used to experiment with a virtual electorate, to determine the conditions under which vote-chasing candidates gain an advantage or perhaps even cause election outcomes to be objectively irrational.