The democracy-ochlocracy-dictatorship transition in the Sznajd model and in the Ising model

Since its introduction in 2000, the Sznajd model has been assumed to simulate a democratic community with two parties. The main flaw in this model is that a Sznajd system freezes in the long term in a non-democratic state, which can be either a dictatorship or a stalemate configuration. Here we show that the Sznajd model has better to be considered as a transition model, transferring a democratic system already at the beginning of a simulation via an ochlocratic scenario, i.e., a regime in which several mobs rule, to a dictatorship, thus reproducing the corresponding Aristotelian theory. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.