Corporate Politics and Physicists Modeling Political Instability

Wild turkeys in the hay

Shawn Griffiths at IVN writes on modeling studies that are beginning to dissect and shed light on growing instability in US elections. Relevant to this is the fact that two private political corporations, the Republican and Democratic Parties, are largely in control of the deeper systemic problems in our elections process. Griffiths writes:

“A research group out of MIT, for instance, has shown how the same mathematical formulas that help scientists understand certain phenomena in the physical world can be used to analyze the growing instability in US elections -- an instability these researchers acknowledge is partly due to growing polarization between the two parties and the structure of party primaries. 

‘Our country seems more divided than ever, with election outcomes resembling a pendulum swinging with ever increasing force,’ MIT doctoral student in Physics, Alexander Siegenfeld, told MIT News. He adds that in these ‘unstable’ elections, “a small change in electorate opinion can dramatically swing the election outcome, just as the direction of a small push to a boulder perched on top of a hill can dramatically change its final location.’ 

The study’s analysis identifies a transition in elections beginning in 1970, from a period where elections captured the greater preference of voters to increasing instability that has resulted in an undemocratic phenomenon the study calls ‘negative representation’. In other words, election outcomes increasingly swing further in the opposite direction of the greater preference of voters.”

MIT News writes this about the research:

The findings appear in the journal Nature Physics, in a paper by Alexander Siegenfeld, a doctoral student in physics at MIT, and Yaneer Bar-Yam, the president of the New England Complex Systems Institute. 

“Our country seems more divided than ever, with election outcomes resembling a pendulum swinging with ever increasing force,” Siegenfeld says. In this regime of “unstable” elections, he says, “a small change in electorate opinion can dramatically swing the election outcome, just as the direction of a small push to a boulder perched on top of a hill can dramatically change its final location.” 

That’s partly a result of an increasingly polarized electorate, he explains. The researchers drew from a previous analysis that went through the Republican and Democratic party platforms in every presidential election year since 1944 and counted the number of polarizing words using a combination of machine learning and human analysis. The numbers show a relatively stable situation before 1970 but a dramatic increase in polarization since then. 

The team then found that the Ising model, which was developed to explain the behavior of ferromagnets and other physical systems, is mathematically equivalent to certain models of elections and accurately describes the onset of instability in electoral systems. 

“What happened in 1970 is a phase transition[1] like the boiling of water. Elections went from stable to unstable,” explained Bar-Yam. 

The increasing instability also results in part from the structure of party primary systems, which have greatly increased their role in candidate selection since the ’70s. Because the voters in primaries tend to have more extreme partisan views than those of the general electorate, politicians are more inclined to take positions to appeal to those voters — positions that may be more extreme than those favored by more mainstream voters, and thus less likely to win in the general election. 

This long-term shift from a stable to unstable electoral situation closely resembles what happens to a ferromagnetic metal exposed to a magnetic field, Siegenfeld says, and can be described by the same mathematical formulas. But why should formulas derived for such unrelated subject matter be relevant to this field? 

Siegenfeld says that’s because in physics, it’s not always necessary to know the details of the underlying objects or mechanisms to be able to produce useful and meaningful results. He compares that to the way physicists were able to describe the behavior of sound waves — which are essentially the aggregate motions of atoms — with great precision, long before they knew about the existence of atoms. 

“When we apply physics to understanding the fundamental particles of our universe, we don’t actually know the underlying details of the theories,” he says. “Yet we can still make incredibly accurate predictions.”

This looks like an at least partial explanation for why so many Americans are unhappy with the two party system. It could help explain why the outcomes of elections seems to lead to government that is not responsive to majority public opinion.[2] The concept of negative representation is something that never occurred to me. But, as the physicists describe the concept, it seems spot on in describing what is going on in America’s increasingly minority-driven politics. Maybe the physicists are starting to get a handle on what’s going on and where we can possibly look for solutions, e.g., democratic and republican corporate ownership of the electoral process.


Footnotes: 
1. Reference to phase transition is compatible with seeing politics as a complex adaptive system and the transition period we are in as a bifurcation point that such systems undergo from time to time. It may be the case that over time this line of research can lead to deeper insights about both politics and human history in general. As long as there is sufficient data to input to the model, the predictions and/or explanations could be very helpful to inform strategies to foster long-term human survival and well being. Time will tell.

2. The very first consideration in the core ‘service to the public interest’ moral of pragmatic rationalism is, and always has been, reasonable consideration for majority public opinion, e.g., “being reasonably responsive to public opinion.” It seems that as more data accumulates, pragmatic rationalism increasingly looks to be directly relevant to try to at least partly fix what what is broken in US politics.