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Ising model

Ising-like model predicts close elections

Nature Reviews Physics volume 6, page 531 (2024)Cite this article

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There’s a decent chance you will be affected by an election this year: around half the world’s population lives in regions holding polls in 2024. Many elections are remarkably close in terms of vote shares — for instance, in the 2024 Slovak presidential election, the popular vote was split 53% to Peter Pellegrini and 47% to Ivan Korčok. Such close outcomes often happen even if one candidate holds a strong lead in opinion polls in the months before the election. Writing in Physical Review E, Olivier Devauchelle and colleagues show that this outcome is a mathematical inevitability — at least in a simplified Ising-like model. They show that if voters tend to agree with their neighbours but dislike aligning with the reported majority opinion, then the electorate can tend towards a 50–50 split, with two spatially segregated camps. This split is a size-dependent phenomenon: the model predicts that smaller electorates tend towards consensus instead.

If the voters’ behaviour isn’t too random, the electorate splits into 2 camps of comparable size, which are spatially segregated. Devauchelle et al. refer to this phenomenon as the split-society phase. From a physics point of view this phase is interesting, because it is ordered, like a ferromagnetic phase is, but its susceptibility (a measure of how much the average vote changes in response to an external influence) doesn’t diverge like that of a ferromagnetic phase but stays finite at all temperatures. Studying the susceptibility also indicates that the split-society phase only occurs if the system is large enough.

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References

Original article

  • Devauchelle, O., Szymczak, P. & Nowakowski, P. Dislike of general opinion makes for tight elections. Phys. Rev. E 109, 044106 (2024)

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  1. Nature Reviews Physics https://www.nature.com/natrevphys/

    Zoe Budrikis

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  1. Zoe Budrikis
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Correspondence to Zoe Budrikis.

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Budrikis, Z. Ising-like model predicts close elections. Nat Rev Phys 6, 531 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-024-00753-w

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