Voting Game Design

The Voting Game is a simple model of the political process. It is based on the games studied by Peter Donnelly of the University College of Swansea in Wales and Dominc Welch of the University of Oxford. The simulation includes voters who randomly get assigned to be Democrats or Republicans. In the course of the simulation, these voters change political opinions by adapting to the political beliefs of one of their 8 neighbors (where the choice of neighbor is random).

Category

 * Social Science

Explorations

 * Open the "Mixed Blessings" worksheet and run it. Observe how the political opinions of people change over time. The Counter will keep track of the number of people in each party and display it in the Simulation Properties window.
 * Press the J key to force your voters to randomly join a political party.
 * Create your own worksheets and populate them with voters using the "Draw Rectangle" tool. They will randomly be assigned to be Democrats or Republicans as they are dropped in the worksheet. Run the newly created worksheets and observe the oscillations of opinions. Do your voters settle to one party or do their opinions keep changing for ever?

Acknowledgements

 * This simulation was inspired by the description of these games in the book The Armchair Universe, by A.K. Dewdney.
 * Simulation was built by Alexander Repenning.

The book recommendation above is linked to Amazon.com to allow you to get more information about the book including reviews and to be able to directly order it.