dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaStability of leadership in bottom-up hierarchical organizations
| Authors | Serge Galam |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | physics/0703081 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0703081 |
Abstract
The stability of a leadership against a growing internal opposition is studied in bottom-up hierarchical organizations. Using a very simple model with bottom-up majority rule voting, the dynamics of power distribution at the various hierarchical levels is calculated within a probabilistic framework. Given a leadership at the top, the opposition weight from the hierarchy bottom is shown to fall off quickly while climbing up the hierarchy. It reaches zero after only a few hierarchical levels. Indeed the voting process is found to obey a threshold dynamics with a deterministic top outcome. Accordingly the leadership may stay stable against very large amplitude increases in the opposition at the bottom level. An opposition can thus grow steadily from few percent up to seventy seven percent with not one a single change at the elected top level. However and in contrast, from one election to another, in the vicinity of the threshold, less than a one percent additional shift at the bottom level can drive a drastic and brutal change at the top. The opposition topples the current leadership at once. In addition to analytical formulas, results from a large scale simulation are presented. The results may shed a new light on management architectures as well as on alert systems. They could also provide some different insight on last century's Eastern European communist collapse.
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"abstract": "The stability of a leadership against a growing internal opposition is\nstudied in bottom-up hierarchical organizations. Using a very simple model with\nbottom-up majority rule voting, the dynamics of power distribution at the\nvarious hierarchical levels is calculated within a probabilistic framework.\nGiven a leadership at the top, the opposition weight from the hierarchy bottom\nis shown to fall off quickly while climbing up the hierarchy. It reaches zero\nafter only a few hierarchical levels. Indeed the voting process is found to\nobey a threshold dynamics with a deterministic top outcome. Accordingly the\nleadership may stay stable against very large amplitude increases in the\nopposition at the bottom level. An opposition can thus grow steadily from few\npercent up to seventy seven percent with not one a single change at the elected\ntop level. However and in contrast, from one election to another, in the\nvicinity of the threshold, less than a one percent additional shift at the\nbottom level can drive a drastic and brutal change at the top. The opposition\ntopples the current leadership at once. In addition to analytical formulas,\nresults from a large scale simulation are presented. The results may shed a new\nlight on management architectures as well as on alert systems. They could also\nprovide some different insight on last century\u0027s Eastern European communist\ncollapse.",
"arxiv_id": "physics/0703081",
"authors": [
"Serge Galam"
],
"categories": [
"physics.soc-ph"
],
"title": "Stability of leadership in bottom-up hierarchical organizations",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0703081"
},
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