Title: Formal theories of politics: The scope of mathematical modelling in political science
Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the scope of mathematical modeling in political science. Mathematical models became popular in political science in the 1950s, when inferential statistics came into common usage. The 1950s and 1960s are referred to as the behavioral era, because most effort was focused on the detection of empirical patterns in voting behavior and public opinion data. There are two major mathematical approaches: political economy and systems modeling. The fundamental axioms of the political economy approach are that individuals in a political system are rational actors and that social outcomes result from the interaction of these individuals within the constraints imposed by social institutions. The second approach, systems modeling, examines the properties of systems and their changes in time. These approaches theorize about aggregates or systemicvariables. The models are useful in dealing with three characteristics of human judgment, namely, the use of a large amount of memory, sequential information processing, and the general process of learning.
Publication Year: 1989
Publication Date: 1989-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 9
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