The Role of Active Leaders in Opinion Formation on Social Networks
The intentional polarization of opinions and controlled changes of a consensus represent potentially harmful processes for any liberal society. Within the framework of a simple model for constructive opinion exchange, we analytically study the role of active leaders on the overall opinion dynamics on social networks. Similar to zealots with rigid opinions, active leaders are assumed to follow a prescribed and individual agenda. We characterize both the ability of single active leading agents to shift a prevailing consensus as well as the emerging social polarization in the case of two antagonistic opinion leaders. To this end we define measures for the coherence of opinions and their polarizability and relate those to graph based quantities derived from a modified Laplacian of the system. We apply the formalism to synthetic and empirical networks and find that while polarizability is decreased for small-worldness and favored in the case of a pronounced community structure the opposite is true for the coherence of opinions during a consensus change.