In politics, the influence of swing voters is well known, especially when the situation is highly partisan, as those with largely entrenched positions tend to cancel each other out, and the decision is swung by those undecided few in the middle ground.

Of course, in reality, people don’t fall neatly into particular camps, and the middle ground tends to shift over time as people observe both the environment and the views of others.  A new paper from the Santa Fe Institute attempts to take account of this complexity and develop a greater understanding of the pivotal components that underpin decision making in a wide range of systems.

“We propose a generalizable approach for identifying pivotal components across a wide variety of systems,” the researchers say. “These systems go beyond voting, and include social media (like Twitter), biology (like the statistics of neurons), or finance (like fluctuations of the stock market).”

Pivotal components

The paper highlights that these pivotal components have a number of statistical signatures that allowed the researchers to trace to communities on Twitter, stock indices in financial markets, and votes in Congress.  The researchers reveal that there is considerable diversity in how social systems tend to depend upon these sensitive points, or indeed if they exist at all.

For instance, their analysis reveals that between 1994 and 2005, the Supreme Court was largely dominated by non-partisan patterns, despite the presence of highly partisan events, such as the Bush vs Gore vote, which decided the 2000 presidential election.

By contrast, the New Jersey State Supreme Court exhibited two pivotal voters playing a major role in votes between 2007 and 2010.  It’s a level of variation that the researchers believe reflects the role of rules and norms within each institution.

“This concentration of power may correspond to weakness because focused pressure, such as intense lobbying, might be used to control outcomes, a kind of tyrannical exploitation of democracy,” the researchers say.

They believe it opens up the possibility for learning how institutional mechanisms tend to diffuse their power away from swing voters, concentrating it instead into the hands of a relatively small number of individuals.

The researchers hope that their framework could be equally useful in helping us to identify the pivotal components in a wide range of other systems that consist of a multitude of constituents that are changing simultaneously.