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2018-04-17-computational-politics.md

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Computational politics
2018-04-17
1200px-house_of_commons_2010.jpg
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Computational politics: the application of computer science to politics. There seem to be a few interesting ways that CS might be applied to politics.

The dynamics of politics

Political structures change over time. What causes them to change? How have they changed and how should they change?

Evolution of political systems

How have the state, rule of law and accountability changed over the years?

Can we take a data driven approach to answering this question by parsing historic legal documents and media?

Can we construct a taxonomy of various governments?

  • Where have they descended from? What are their common ancestors.
  • Are different governments converging on a single optimal solution?

How do governments mutate/change?

What has correlated which governmental change? What are the likely causes that drive change?

(inspired by Political Order and Political Decay)

Self-regulating systems

Can we model a government as a type of self-regulating system?

What are the possible ways to self-regulate?

  • When do they emerge?
  • Under what conditions do complex systems learn to self-regulate?
  • What are the possible steady-state self-regulating solutions of populations? (what are the different types of governance possible?)

Institutional learning

  • Is institutional learning harder than other settings of learning? If so, what conditions make it harder?
  • How quickly is it possibly for institutions to learn (the lower bound)? What are the limiting factors/resources (money, equality, quality of the state, ...???)?
  • Can political institutions avoid decay?

Metrics for governments

Which metrics are important for understanding governments? Imagine if we could measure;

State: What makes a good state?

The ability to efficiently achieve what parliament sets as its goals.

Accountability: Were electoral promises kept?

Next election, we could collect all political rhetoric and analyse. Who lied the most? Which promises were made and have they been kept? Who was consistent with the values they were voted in on?

Rule of law: Is the law being applied equally?

Is there bias in the application of the law?

Other possible tools

  • tools for representing arguments (automated steel man tool that finds evidence) and finding common ground/values
  • politicalese translation
  • automated fact checking