A mathematical model of the pressure of an extreme ideology on a society

Extreme behavior is produced by small groups, but affects a large amount of people. The fear, the usual strategy of these groups, influences the decisions of the whole population. In this paper we propose a dynamical mathematical model to study the ideological evolution of the population in a region where some groups want to get political goals through violence. After a classification of the subpopulations using data from votes obtained by political parties in general elections, model parameters have been estimated and future tendencies are studied. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.