Description
This book provides tractable computational analyses of the crucial but complex processes of government formation and survival.
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).
Reviews
'When what works in theory fails in practice, it is time to think differently. Here, de Marchi and Laver develop a new theoretical approach for understanding the governance cycle in parliamentary democracies. By skillfully melding ideas from fields such as game theory, behavioral decision making, AI, and the computational modeling of complex systems, they produce key new insights into the behavior of political systems while also providing a masterful demonstration of the theoretical potential of 21st century social science.' John Miller, Carnegie Mellon
'Finally! de Marchi and Laver show, with smart theory and new methods capable of dealing with real world complexity, how and when savvy politicians form governments, sustain them, and bring them down. This is a terrifically useful book that comparativists can apply to understanding government formation almost anywhere, written in an accessible and often witty style.' Steven Wilkinson, Yale University
'In this foundational contribution to computational social science, de Marchi and Laver transform institutional analysis. Most important, they privilege realism by constructing and analyzing a far more descriptively accurate model of government formation processes than exists in the formal literature. That realism precludes the derivation of optimal strategies creating an opportunity for the authors to make plausible assumptions about party behavior. Their double pivot - toward institutional realism and away from full rationality - produces a compelling model with strong empirical support that will provide a template for future scholars.' Scott Page, University of Michigan
Book Information
ISBN 9781009315487
Author Scott de Marchi
Format Paperback
Page Count 200
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 350g
Dimensions(mm) 228mm * 152mm * 13mm