The following article is being submitted as my Master’s Thesis as part of my enrollment as a PhD student in the department of Politics at New York University. I am posting it here as a working paper, and welcome any and all questions, comments or criticisms.
On several occasions in recent history, extreme external shocks have propelled legislatures to rapidly create new laws to address the fallout from these events. These situations can be pivotal in the creation of new and sometimes controversial laws that likely would not have passed without the effect of these shocks. Critical to understanding how these shocks manifest in new laws is the development of a model that describes the process by which these shocks affect voters across multiple policy dimensions simultaneously. This research attempts to address this by introducing a model of non-separable policy preference called the “preference system”, a graph theoretic representation of voter preference wherein all policy dimensions are interrelated in positive and negative ways. To test the effect of shocks on voter behavior an agent-based model of a committee-centric legislature is developed. At its core the ABM is based on Krehbiel’s model of pivotal politics, but a computational framework is used to encapsulate the full complexity of the networked representation of voter preference proposed. Several experiments are developed to simulate how various shocks affect voting. These experiments provide examples of how shock can effect voter behavior. From these examples, the experiments show that changes in status quo to policy dimensions directly targeted by a shock are relatively predictable, with new status quo moving in the direction of the shock. Changes to non-target policy dimensions and the magnitude of a shock’s effect on all policy dimensions, however, are highly unpredictable. While these examples provide some evidence, a systematic investigation model parameterization is needed to fully understand how external shocks effect voting. Concluding remarks discuss future experiment design, which will provide a more systematic investigation of the model.
Automatically Generated Related posts:
- USAF Base at Manas and the Pivotal Politics Model
- PyVote Goes to Work with the “Greedy Conservative” Simulation
- Structurally Induced Random Graph Model of Social Networks
- The “rally effect” on Leader Specific Punishment in conflict scenarios
- Information Technology and its Effect on Nations and Their Peoples
Popular Posts