Opinion formation amongst large groups of connected individual autonomous agents or voters is a complex phenomena to accurately model and indeed understand. The Sznajd model describes a simple set of rules for an individual voter to influence its neighbours and for an initially randomly-mixed set of opinion holders to converge to a single consensus opinion. We consider quantitative effects of having more than the usual two opposing opinions (or political parties) present and study what happens to the time to achieve consensus when many minority opinions might initially be present in a system. We report on numerical experiments with systems of up to ten opposing different opinions or political parties present in the original mix and also on the effect of increasing the number of neighbours a single voter can influence.
Keywords: policy issues; political process modelling; agent based modelling; opinion formation model; interdisciplinary modelling; Sznajd model.
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