Circulation of Elites in an Adaptive Network Model

Abstract: Societies experience politically stable and unstable phases along history, whereas political power is usually passed to new elite groups by these changes. Structural dynamics of the elites in a society have been proposed to be one of the core drivers shaping long term behavior. As current models and data are rather macroscopic, the emergence of macroscopic behavior from microscopic dynamics is largely unclear. Here, we introduce an adaptive network model of directed links representing political power and competing political ideas, based on local dynamical rules, only. The model is based on two socially motivated behaviors: the cumulative advantage effect of political power and intra-elite conflict. We observe punctuated equilibria as an emergent behavior and find a phase transition towards a disordered phase. We define an advance warning measure for elite collapse and find that the states of only a few largest nodes are suitable as a proxy with predictive information.