Phase transition in a coevolving network of conformist and contrarian voters

In the coevolving voter model, each voter has one of two diametrically opposite opinions, and a voter encountering a neighbor with the opposite opinion may either adopt it or rewire the connection to another randomly chosen voter sharing the same opinion. As we smoothly change the relative frequency of rewiring compared to that of adoption, there occurs a phase transition between an active phase and a frozen phase. By performing extensive Monte Carlo calculations, we show that the phase transition is characterized by critical exponents β=0.54(1) and ν =1.5(1), which differ from the existing mean-field-type prediction. We furthermore extend the model by introducing a contrarian type that tries to have neighbors with the opposite opinion, and show that the critical behavior still belongs to the same universality class irrespective of such contrarians' fraction.

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