Simulating political attitudes and voting behavior

Understanding the dynamics of attitude formation is a key issue in social psychology. The paper presents a computational model for simulating the formation and change of attitudes and the influence of the strength of attitudes on behavior. The main conceptual challenge was to capture not only the traditional attitude concept but the full concept of attitude strength. This required combining different theoretical approaches within an integrated modeling framework. The dynamics of political attitudes of German citizens were chosen as specific application area because of the considerable amount of empirical data available. The model was tested by simulating the effects of different voting campaign strategies on the outcome of an election. Uncertainties in model parameters were accounted for by using Monte Carlo simulations. The implications of specific theoretical assumptions were investigated by performing model simulations for different model structures. The paper shows the potential of social simulation when it comes to bringing together different theoretical approaches. The integration within a model exposes gaps and inconsistencies and allows formulating hypotheses for further empirical investigations. The model has a modular structure and provides a rich repository for other modelers who are working in the field of attitude simulation.