Dynamics of Vacillating Voters

Renaud Lambiotte, Université catholique de Louvain
Sidney Redner, Boston University

Abstract

We introduce the vacillating voter model in which each voter consults two neighbors to decide its state, and changes opinion if it disagrees with either neighbor. This irresolution leads to a global bias toward zero magnetization. In spatial dimension $d>1$, anti-coarsening arises in which the linear dimension $L$ of minority domains grows as $t^{1/(d+1)}$. One consequence is that the time to reach consensus scales exponentially with the number of voters.