Modeling Political Belief and Its Propagation, with Malaysia as a Driving Context

Abstract

We discuss in this paper an agent-based social simulation model that describes the propagation of political belief in Malaysia. Worldview map is used as the representational scheme for political belief. Inter-agent interaction propagates the belief throughout the agent population, subject to similarity of emotion between the interacting agents and their distances apart, and various attributes of the individual agents. Media broadcast m ay be used by agents in their attempt to extend their reach. Computational experiments made using the model point to its plausibility. Further, it highlights, for the ruling coalition, the impo rtance of both a strong political propaganda machinery and a strong governance in winning the hearts and minds of the electorate.