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The article has three purposes. Firstly it introduces into synergetics, an interdisciplinary field of research which is concerned with "cooperative" interactions of individual parts of a system producing macroscopic spatial, temporal or functional structures. Secondly, a general modelling strategy for building mathematical models for dynamic processes at the macrolevel of the society is presented and its relation to the general concepts of synergetics is explained. Thirdly, the modelling procedure is concretely applied to a simple dynamical model of collective political opinion formation: After establishing the relation between the microlevel of individual decision making and the macrolevel of collective opinion variables, the master equation for the probability distribution over the "sodoconfiguration" is set up and dynamic equations for the quasi‐mean values of the relevant macrovariables are derived. The model comprises the cases of liberal and totalitarian political systems and enables the mathematical description of phase transitions between both. Computer simulations of characteristic political opinion scenarios illustrate the model and are sociologically interpreted.
Wolfgang Weidlich (Sat,) studied this question.