Circulation of Elites in an Adaptive Network Model

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jochim, Alexander, Bornholdt, Stefan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Jochim, Alexander
Bornholdt, Stefan
author_facet Jochim, Alexander
Bornholdt, Stefan
contents Societies experience politically stable and unstable phases along history, whereas political power is usually passed to new elite groups by these changes. Structural dynamics of the elites in a society have been proposed to be one of the core drivers shaping long term behavior. As current models and data are rather macroscopic, the emergence of macroscopic behavior from microscopic dynamics is largely unclear. Here, we introduce an adaptive network model of directed links representing political power and competing political ideas, based on local dynamical rules, only. The model is based on two socially motivated behaviors: the cumulative advantage effect of political power and intra-elite conflict. We observe punctuated equilibria as an emergent behavior and find a phase transition towards a disordered phase. We define an advance warning measure for elite collapse and find that the states of only a few largest nodes are suitable as a proxy with predictive information.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_17434
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Circulation of Elites in an Adaptive Network Model
Jochim, Alexander
Bornholdt, Stefan
Physics and Society
Statistical Mechanics
Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
Societies experience politically stable and unstable phases along history, whereas political power is usually passed to new elite groups by these changes. Structural dynamics of the elites in a society have been proposed to be one of the core drivers shaping long term behavior. As current models and data are rather macroscopic, the emergence of macroscopic behavior from microscopic dynamics is largely unclear. Here, we introduce an adaptive network model of directed links representing political power and competing political ideas, based on local dynamical rules, only. The model is based on two socially motivated behaviors: the cumulative advantage effect of political power and intra-elite conflict. We observe punctuated equilibria as an emergent behavior and find a phase transition towards a disordered phase. We define an advance warning measure for elite collapse and find that the states of only a few largest nodes are suitable as a proxy with predictive information.
title Circulation of Elites in an Adaptive Network Model
topic Physics and Society
Statistical Mechanics
Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17434