AUTOREGRESSIVE INFLUENCE AND THE DURABILITY OF POLITICAL DISAGREEMENT

This paper combines results from survey research and simulation to address questions regarding the nature and impact of political communication among citizens. While influential and long-standing theories predict that political disagreement will be a rare event among people who communicate on a frequent basis, the accumulating evidence points to a different conclusion. Indeed, political disagreement is remarkably durable even within closely held networks of political communication, and while communication among interdependent citizens is frequently influential, it does not eliminate diversity. Following Axelrod's suggestion that an agent-based model can be a useful tool for "thought experiments " and the clarification of theory, we have used the Swarm simulation toolkit to investigate the formation of discussion networks and implications of theories about persuasion and information exchange