The Effects of Apathy and Ignorance on Political Corruption in a Democracy Game.
Or, Can You Fool All of the People All of the Time?

This is a strategy game to see how some global parameters can affect
the individual choices that people make in a democratic situation,
which in turn determines the fortunes of political parties.
Apathy is a measure of how motivated voters are to vote; ignorance
is an indication of how susceptible they they are to propaganda.

Consider a set of voters and political parties. For simplicity,
only one party gets voted into power at a time. Voters also pay
taxes to the government, controlled by the ruling party, which is used
to secure benefits for the voters. Voters may also optionally choose
to contribute to political parties. Ideally, voters install parties
into power who work equally for their everyone. Parties may choose
to spend some of their capital on propaganda instead of real benefits.
Propaganda takes the form of positive (or negative) perceived benefits,
the perception being mediated by the ignorance of the voter.

So parties get votes and money from people and send benefits and
propaganda back to them. The extent to which real benefits are withheld,
wasted on propaganda, and/or skewed in favor of a subset of voters
determines the amount of political corruption.

The goal of voters and parties is to acquire wealth. Voters might do
this by either paying in the minimum in mandatory taxes and expecting
an equivalent amount of wealth to return in benefits, or by attempting
to rig the system by devoting some of their disposible income to
party contributions that optimally will be reciprocated with
extra benefits. Parties want to build a "war chest" of funds. This war
chest may be used to pay out real benefits or phony propaganda benefits
that will cheaply fool ignorant voters into thinking they are getting
real benefits. Of course only the party in power can disburse real 
benefits, so those out of power will likely disperse negative propaganda
to despoil the view that voters have of the ruling party. For this reason,
voters may also choose to contribute to parties out of power, since this
may allow them to eventually return to power and return real benefits.

So one strategy for a party is to be perfectly honest, hope
that voters perceive it as such, and will therefore keep electing it.
Another is to soak up contributions and use them to pull the wool over
voters' eyes using propaganda. Another is just to hoard as much as
possible and probably experience a short stay in power.

A strategy for a voter is to just observe whether he is getting
what he thinks is a fair amount of benefits and vote for a party
who gives it to him, else for an opposing party. Another strategy is to
give to a party who will then favor him and hope that the sum of
contributions can fund a propaganda campaign to keep it in power.

The game will be played out for generations of voters. Vote strategies
that result in more wealth will be spread into the population using
a genetic algorithm. Those voters having less wealth will see their
numbers (and their strategies) dwindle. A inhibiting mechanism might
arise when an excess of voters try to rig the system and become
disgruntled when they do not get what they expect in benefits.

Parties do not die in the time frame of the game, but they may also change
with something like hill-climbing in a parameter space of strategies.

Apathy will serve as a threshold under which voters will not output a
vote for a party. This means that an apathetic voter will not vote until
his strategy tells him that he has a strong reason to do so.

Both apathy and ignorance may be probability distributions of some
plausible sort.

System parameters:

Number of voters.
Number of parties.
Apathy and Ignorance distributions.
Voter income.
Voter tax amount.
Propaganda payoff ratio, e.g. one dollar of propaganda might be perceived
as two dollars of benefits by a totally ignorant voter.

Voter:
Properties: Apathy, ignorance, party loyalty, and various
            function controlling constants.
Inputs: Personal wealth, perceived (real and propaganda) benefits,
        and knowledge of which party is in power.
Outputs: Party votes and contributions.

Party:
Properties: Various function controlling constants.
Inputs: Amount of taxes, amount of contributions, number of voters,
        amount in war chest, individual voter contributions, in-power
        status.
Outputs: Voter benefits and propaganda.

Example:

A vote for party A from a particular voter might be given by:

vote strength = (skepticism * perceived benefits) -
                (tax paid + contribution to party A)) + party loyalty.

where skepticism is a constant concerning how much the voter thinks he is
being tricked by propaganda, and party loyalty is the "staying power" of
a voter over perhaps a rough patch for the party.

Then the greatest positive vote strength will be use to vote for whichever
party, as long it is greater than the apathy of the voter. If the
apathy is 0, then only one positive vote strength would produce a vote.

Reference:
"Democratic Structure, Interest Groups, and Government Performance",
by Marco A. Castaneda

12/18/2006

Instead of apathy factor, will have "hedgehogs" vs. "foxes" as the 
inclination to do something when faced with change. This sort of
incorporates apathy and stuborness.

So now government gets votes and taxes from people, each of whom have
a set of values that they expect the government to spend capital on.
The gov again my do so with propaganda or by actually implementing the
values of the constituents.