The Persistence of Heterogeneity: Revisiting the Axelrod Culture Model

Previous computational modeling work has shown cultural and ideological diffusion to act quickly to produce zones of homogeneous polarized cultures that have difficulty interacting with each other. Yet we do not always observe large zones of cultural homogeneity in the real world. Rather, we witness interesting variation in homo- and heterogeneity across and within different world populations and cultures. I argue that one of the key features left out of previous models of culture is the role of network structure and communication barriers in shaping the flow of information between individuals and groups. Accounting for this structure allows for the greater applicability of culture models to understanding any number of modern cultural and ideological phenomena, including ideological polarization, social communication, and cultural drift. I illustrate this argument by embedding a classic culture model (Axelrod 1997) in a more complex network structure, replicating and extending previous simulations to show that different structure does, in fact, change the equilibrium conditions of the model and make it more representative of the world we observe empirically. This finding suggests that we should not take network structure lightly in our research when examining patterns of political communication, culture, and conflict.