Models and Methods Commons^™

Human Development Dynamics: An Agent Based Simulation Of Macro Social Systems And Individual Heterogeneous Evolutionary Games, Mark Abdollahian, Zining Yang, Travis Coan, Birol Yesilada

Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Purpose: In the context of modernization and development, a complex adaptive systems framework can help address the coupling of macro social constraint and opportunity with individual agency. Combining system dynamics and agent based modeling, we formalize a simulation approach of the Human Development (HD) perspective to explore the interactive effects of economics, culture, society and politics across multiple human scales.

Methods: Based on a system of asymmetric, coupled nonlinear equations, we first capture the core qualitative logic of HD theory, empirically validated from World Values Survey (WVS) data. Using a simple evolutionary game approach, second we fuse endogenously derived individual …

Power Transition Theory And The Global Arms Trade: Exploring Constructs From Social Network Analysis, David Todd Kinsella

Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Structural dimensions of the international system are key elements in power transition theory. Most theoretical applications to date have examined the distribution of power, and fluctuations in that distribution, as a precursor to global and regional warfare. Somewhat less attention has been paid to the coalitional structure of the international system in applied research. In this paper I suggest that certain concepts from power transition theory, including those that rely on information about alliance membership, might also be operationalized by examining the global arms trade using tools developed for social network analysis (SNA). I focus in particular on the SNA …