A Multi-Agent Approach for Modeling Oligarchs' Campaign Donations with Simulated Spatial Elections

We present the OLIGO model, a multi-agent simulation of oligarchy. We extend previous multi-agent-based, spatial models of democracy by adding a new class of agents, oligarchs, which represent leaders of firms in a common industry who lobby for beneficial subsidies through campaign donations. We test hypotheses from the literature in political economics on the behavior of oligarchs and political parties as they interact, under conditions of imperfect information and bounded rationality. By verifying that central hypotheses from the economics literature hold for the OLIGO model, we accomplish two goals: (1) We show that the simple rules agents follow in our model are sufficient to capture much of the complex dynamics of this politico-economic system; (2) we validate these results from prior studies that used analytic methods, using an alternative, agent-based modeling method; and (3) we derive support for the claim that the OLIGO model is a useful test environment for novel hypotheses about oligarchs’ campaign donation behavior