Related papers: The Foundations of Political Realism
Political power in the international context can be characterized as a fluid-like substance that circulates through a network of nation states. States can possess it as a stock quantity, reflected by their material capacity or national…
The Internet and the Web are now an integral part of the way most modern societies, and corresponding political systems, work. We regard Political systems as the formal and informal political processes by which decisions are made concerning…
A theoretical model is presented which provides a way to simulate, at a very abstract level, power struggles in the social world. In the model, agents can benefit or harm each other, to varying degrees and with differing levels of…
The best empirical research in political science clearly defines substantive parameters of interest, presents a set of assumptions that guarantee its identification, and uses an appropriate estimator. We argue for the importance of…
We present an equilibrium model of politics in which political platforms compete over public opinion. A platform consists of a policy, a coalition of social groups with diverse intrinsic attitudes to policies, and a narrative. We…
Realism -- the idea that the concepts in physical theories refer to 'things' existing in the real world -- is introduced as a tool to analyze the status of the wave-function. Although the physical entities are recognized by the existence of…
Multi-agent models are a suitable starting point to model complex social interactions. However, as the complexity of the systems increase, we argue that novel modeling approaches are needed that can deal with inter-dependencies at different…
Organization concepts and models are increasingly being adopted for the design and specification of multi-agent systems. Agent organizations can be seen as mechanisms of social order, created to achieve global (or organizational) objectives…
We formalize the argument that political disagreements can be traced to a "clash of narratives". Drawing on the "Bayesian Networks" literature, we model a narrative as a causal model that maps actions into consequences, weaving a selection…
We describe a representation in a high-level transition system for policies that express a reactive behavior for the agent. We consider a target decision component that figures out what to do next and an (online) planning capability to…
Agent-based models are versatile tools for studying how societal opinion change, including political polarization and cultural diffusion, emerges from individual behavior. This study expands agents' psychological realism using…
Multi-agent models are a suitable starting point to model complex social interactions. However, as the complexity of the systems increase, we argue that novel modeling approaches are needed that can deal with inter-dependencies at different…
On the basis of the general character and operation of the process of perception, a formalism is sought to mathematically describe the subjective or abstract/mental process of perception. It is shown that the formalism of orthodox quantum…
Many networks do not live in isolation but are strongly interacting, with profound consequences on their dynamics. Here, we consider the case of two interacting social networks and, in the context of a simple model, we address the case of…
A multi-level model of opinion formation is presented which takes into account that attitudes on different issues are usually not independent. In the model, agents exchange beliefs regarding a series of facts. A cognitive structure of…
Many complex systems can be modeled as multiagent systems in which the constituent entities (agents) interact with each other. The global dynamics of such a system is determined by the nature of the local interactions among the agents.…
A formal but intuitive framework is introduced to bridge the gap between data obtained from empirical studies and that generated by agent-based models. This is based on three key tenets. Firstly, a simulation can be given multiple formal…
It is known that individual opinions on different policy issues often align to a dominant ideological dimension (e.g. "left" vs. "right") and become increasingly polarized. We provide an agent-based model that reproduces these two stylized…
Ideological leanings of an individual can often be gauged by the sentiment one expresses about different issues. We propose a simple framework that represents a political ideology as a distribution of sentiment polarities towards a set of…
Social scientists have become increasingly interested in how narratives -- the stories in fiction, politics, and life -- shape beliefs, behavior, and government policies. This paper provides an unsupervised method to quantify latent…