Opinion Formation Based Optimization in Audio Steganography

This concluding chapter summarizes the main findings of the preceding chapters in light of the model of contextual effects on voter behavior. Accordingly, the processes of communication and politicization are of key importance for contextual effects. By implication, we cannot take for granted that contextual features exert sizable effects on voters’ opinion formation and behavior in each and every case. Findings about contextual effects are also context-sensitive and thus do not lend themselves to generalization by default. These observations suggest that context plays a nuanced and conditional role in voting behavior. Exploring it further should be a focal topic of future research on political behavior and democratic politics.

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Voters and Voting in Context

10.1093/oso/9780198792130.003.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Harald Schoen ◽

Sigrid Roßteutscher ◽

Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck ◽

Bernhard Weßels ◽

Christof Wolf

Keyword(s):

Voting Behavior ◽

Contextual Effects ◽

First Century ◽

Sources Of Information ◽

Opinion Formation ◽

Contextual Features ◽

Early Twenty ◽

Methodological Approaches ◽

Rich Data ◽

Theoretical Issues

After a brief review of the scholarly discussion about the idea that context affects political behavior, this chapter proposes a model for the analysis of contextual effects on opinion formation and voting behavior. It highlights theoretical issues in the interplay of various contextual features and voter predispositions in bringing about contextual effects on voters. This model guides the analyses of contextual effects on voter behavior in Germany in the early twenty-first century. These analyses draw on rich data from multiple voter surveys and various sources of information about contextual features. The chapter also gives an overview of different methodological approaches and challenges in the analysis of contextual effects on voting behavior.

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Opinion Dynamics Optimization by Varying Susceptibility to Persuasion via Non-Convex Local Search

ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data ◽

10.1145/3466617 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 16 (2) ◽

pp. 1-34

Author(s):

Rediet Abebe ◽

T.-H. HUBERT Chan ◽

Jon Kleinberg ◽

Zhibin Liang ◽

David Parkes ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Local Search ◽

Objective Function ◽

Iterative Process ◽

Large Scale ◽

Opinion Dynamics ◽

Theoretical Models ◽

Global Optimum ◽

Local Optimum ◽

Opinion Formation ◽

Long Line

A long line of work in social psychology has studied variations in people’s susceptibility to persuasion—the extent to which they are willing to modify their opinions on a topic. This body of literature suggests an interesting perspective on theoretical models of opinion formation by interacting parties in a network: in addition to considering interventions that directly modify people’s intrinsic opinions, it is also natural to consider interventions that modify people’s susceptibility to persuasion. In this work, motivated by this fact, we propose an influence optimization problem. Specifically, we adopt a popular model for social opinion dynamics, where each agent has some fixed innate opinion, and a resistance that measures the importance it places on its innate opinion; agents influence one another’s opinions through an iterative process. Under certain conditions, this iterative process converges to some equilibrium opinion vector. For the unbudgeted variant of the problem, the goal is to modify the resistance of any number of agents (within some given range) such that the sum of the equilibrium opinions is minimized; for the budgeted variant, in addition the algorithm is given upfront a restriction on the number of agents whose resistance may be modified. We prove that the objective function is in general non-convex. Hence, formulating the problem as a convex program as in an early version of this work (Abebe et al., KDD’18) might have potential correctness issues. We instead analyze the structure of the objective function, and show that any local optimum is also a global optimum, which is somehow surprising as the objective function might not be convex. Furthermore, we combine the iterative process and the local search paradigm to design very efficient algorithms that can solve the unbudgeted variant of the problem optimally on large-scale graphs containing millions of nodes. Finally, we propose and evaluate experimentally a family of heuristics for the budgeted variant of the problem.

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Foundational Moments, Representative Claims and the Ecology of Social Ignorance

Political Studies ◽

10.1177/0032321721995639 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 003232172199563

Author(s):

Mihaela Mihai

Keyword(s):

Social Practice ◽

Regime Change ◽

True Belief ◽

Blind Spot ◽

Democratic Politics ◽

Opinion Formation ◽

Post Conflict ◽

Political Imaginary

This article identifies a blind spot in constructivist theories of representation and their account of legitimacy in terms of the challenge posed by ecologies of social ignorance, generally and especially during foundational moments. Social ignorance is conceptualised here not merely as the absence of knowledge or true belief but as a social practice of legitimising epistemically problematic political imaginaries and the institutional systems they underpin. In dialogue with social epistemologists and phenomenologists, the article shows how representation can nurture social ignorance, despite the availability of ample opportunities for political contestation and alternative opinion formation. A permanent feature of democratic politics, this problem becomes most salient during moments of constitutional re-founding, such as regime change, post-conflict reconstruction or constitutional referenda, when representative claims can reconfigure a community’s political imaginary, rendering it more or less ignorant. The representative claims made by the Vote Leave’s key figures during the Brexit referendum campaign serve as illustration.

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