Public Opinion Formation in Policy Issues. An evolutionary approach

We seek to shed new light on the social process of political opinion formation from an evolutionary perspective.We propose a model in which heterogeneous citizens collectively learn and modify their opinions about the most convenient size of public expenditure for the economy. In Section 1, we argue that approaching political processes from an evolutionary perspective may overcome certain theoretical shortcomings in public choice theory and in evolutionary economics. In Section 2, we claim that several features should be considered by an evolutionary approach to political processes: bounded rationality and heterogeneity on the part of agents,normative learning as a socially contingent process, and public opinion formation as an emergent social property. We devote Section 3 to propose a model based on section 2. The dynamic analysis in Section 4 reveals the existence of two regimes characterized by different dynamics for public opinion. Depending on the parametric values, either public opinion displays persistence and ongoing endogenous transformation in a more or less complex way, or it stabilizes in a rather homogenous state of opinion. Section 5 discusses to what extent the range of political opinions supported in a society may influence the complexity of the political process, affecting the time evolution of public expenditure which can turn into a chaotic regime, generating erratic dynamics of the public opinion evolution. Finally we present some conclusions.