Prediction Model for Approval Ratings of Governments

Opinion dynamics is one of the important topics in sociophysics, in which opinion is determined as the collective behavior of many interacting individuals. In this paper, we propose a simple linear prediction model for approval ratings of governments using article number in newspapers. The fairly good agreement between real data and the time sequence generated by the prediction model suggests that the approval ratings might be simply determined by the external forcing of news and damping similar to the linear forced oscillation in mechanics.