Opinion Leaders and the Flows of Citizens’ Political Preferences An Assessment with Agent-based Models Cheng-shan Frank Liu Doctoral Candidate Political Science The University of Kansas The 3 rd Lake Arrowhead Conference on Human Complex Systems

I. Research Questions ● How do opinion leaders influence citizens' voting preferences? ● How do social networks, the media, and opinion leaders together shape the formation of political preferences over time?

Who are Opinion Leaders?  The Definition: Opinion leaders refer to political experts or elites. Compared to other people in a communication network, political experts are those who are more political knowledgeable, more active in political discussion and use the news media, and more likely to perceive political information selectively. Political experts are not necessary to be political analysts on the news media. They are those who their friends and/or family see as trust worthy sources of information.

II. Literature Review The two-step flow model The influence of opinion leaders

II. Literature Review The two-step flow model Katz & Lazarsfeld (1955)

 The influence of elite rhetoric and interpersonal conversations interact with one another.  Opinion leaders framing tend to be short-lived phenomena.  Given cross-cutting interpersonal discussions, opinion leader framing are less influential, especially when conversations include conflicting perspectives.  “Future work on preference formation should consider the simultaneous and competing effects of elite rhetoric and interpersonal discussions” (p.741). II. Literature Review The Influence of Opinion Leaders Druckman & Nelson (2003)

III. Modeling Strategy ● The Swarm toolkit (Objective -C) ● The Receive-Accept-Sample (RAS) model ● John Zaller (1992) ● The Autoregressive Influence Model ● Huckfeldt, Johnson, & Sprague (2004)

The Shared Features among All Agents  Discussants: Agents have 8 network members. The favorite political discussants are those sharing similar party identification and those having higher political expertise.  Voting Preferences and Opinions: Voting Preferences: 1 or 0. Every time after discussion or accessing the new media, agents judge the discussant's voting preference and store the impression in their memory. Their current opinions (0.0 to 1.0) are the moving averages of pass impressions.

The Default Settings 40*40 =1600 citizen agents; Opinion Leaders: 10%, random distributed, half holding “1”; Citizens holding “1”: 50%; Opinion leaders holding “1”: 50%; The news media offering two oppoisite views; Run time: 900 (about 6 months); Random schedule. III. Modeling Strategy

The Difference between Citizens and Opinion Leaders III. Modeling Strategy

IV. Simulation Results  Model 1: Simulation of the 2-step flow model  Model 2: Model 1 + media use.

The Simulation Environment III. Modeling Strategy

Model 1: 2-step flow model IV. Simulation Results Raster taken at the 900 th runtime. P(CitizenAccessMedia)=0

Model 1: 2-step flow model IV. Simulation Results Right: Raster taken at the 900 th runtime (opinion leaders in red) P(CitizenAccessMedia)=0

Model 2: Citizens access opinion leaders, network members, and the news media IV. Simulation Results Left: Raster taken at the 3 rd run time. Right: Raster taken at the 900 th runtime. P(SelectivePerception)=0.1~0.5; P(AccessMedia)=0.1~0.5

Model 2: Citizens access opinion leaders, network members, and the news media IV. Simulation Results Left: Raster taken at the 900 th runtime. Right: Raster taken at the 900 th runtime (opinion leaders in red) P(CitizenAccessMedia)=0

Model 2: Citizens access opinion leaders, network members, and the news media IV. Simulation Results

IV. Conclusions The role of political experts has been overemphasized. The results correspond to Druckman and Nelson (2003) and weaken the two-step flow model. Interacting with like-minded discussants and the selective perception of the news media decrease opinion leaders' influence, regardless that citizens do not selectively perceive opinion leaders' preferences.

V. Implications to Democracy  Voters are not necessary polarized by poloarized opinion leaders.  Education of critical thinking and deliberation will enhane voters' ability to evaluate and resist elites' influence.

VI. Future Research Consider multiple issues; Include more subtle differences beween citizens, e.g. selective perception about opinion leaders influence, the size of communication networks, and group conversation (beyond dyadic interaction), etc. Simulate the influence and the consequences of news event shocks on people's voting preference.

Thank You.  The program codes (in tar balls) are online:  Comments to