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Parliamentary democracy involves a never-ending cycle of elections, government formations, and the need for governments to survive in potentially hostile environments. These conditions require members of any government to make decisions on a large number of issues, some of which sharply divide them. Officials resolve these divisions by 'logrolling'- conceding on issues they care less about, in exchange for reciprocal concessions on issues to which they attach more importance. Though realistically modeling this 'governance cycle' is beyond the scope of traditional formal analysis, this book attacks the problem computationally in two ways. Firstly, it models the behavior of "functionally rational" senior politicians who use informal decision heuristics to navigate their complex high stakes setting. Secondly, by applying computational methods to traditional game theory, it uses artificial intelligence to model how hyper-rational politicians might find strategies that are close to optimal.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. Governance, complexity, computation and rationality; 2. The governance cycle; 3. Agent based model of government formation and survival; 4. Artificial intelligence and government formation; 5. Analyzing models of government formation and survival; 6. The empirics of government formation and survival; 7. Conclusions and aspirations; Appendices.
About the author
Scott de Marchi is Professor of Political Science and Director of Decision Science at Duke University. He is a principal investigator for the for the National Science Foundation's Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models program and his research focuses on decision-making in contexts that include Congress, coalition and crisis bargaining, and interstate conflict.Michael Laver is Emeritus Professor of Politics at New York University. He has published 20 books, including Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Europe (1991), Making and Breaking Governments (1996), and Party Competition: An Agent-Based Model (2014).
Summary
This book uses a computational social science approach to analyze government formation and survival in parliamentary democracies. It models 'functionally rational' politicians who attack complex problems using heuristics and also develops artificial intelligence algorithms which relentlessly learn how best to 'win' the political game.
