Agent-based modeling of how national identity affects party preferences in voting
- Taiji Ueno, School of Human Sciences, Takachiho University, Tokyo, Japan
- Ryu Hakche, Neo Career, Co. Ltd., Tokyo, Japan
- Nobuko Asai, Faculty of Social Relations, Kyoto-Bunkyo University, Uji, Japan
- Minoru Karasawa, Psych and Cognitive Sciences, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan
AbstractAttitudes concerning national identity (e.g., nationalism, patriotism) are known to correlate with various social behaviors such as party preferences in voting. For instance, survey data indicates that Japanese citizens who are proud of being Japanese (i.e., patriots) and those who are high in a right-wing tendency are more willing to vote for the conservative party (Liberal Democratic Party). In this study, we employed an agent-based modeling approach to understand how national identity affects individual voting intentions. The individual agents and the political party agents interacted with each other by spreading their political attitudes (e.g., VAT should be increased to maintain the pension insurance system), and the recipients of the messages changed their attitudes (e.g., persuasion). The simulation revealed that the effects of persuasive messages were moderated by the strength of its own national identity attitudes, and the resultant individual agent’s voting preferences simulated the human participants data more precisely.