Tag: ECPR2020

  • Playing with Worlds

    If we must play with toy worlds to see if we can mimic the “natural condition” of Hobbes, it is good to see whether our ambitions run into obstacles, Mr. Sum thought. I discuss how I proceeded. I started by choosing a geographic area that is composed of a number of (for the time being…

  • Behind the Reproduction Number

    So far I have derived as much insight as possible from two series of simple numbers, thought Mr. Node, the weekly numbers of COVID infections and the weekly numbers of COVID deaths. I copied them from the databases that were set up immediately as soon as it became clear how badly the virus spread and…

  • A Hypothesis

    Mr. Node summarizes what he ventured to deduce from the infection, death and reproduction numbers. Assuming that there are such things as mean incubation times and mean durations of fatal disease beds, the question is how to estimate them. A single glance at the picture for phase 1 for the Netherlands shows that the curves…

  • Requirements for a Leviathan Game

    From the summary you can read the requirements of what a Leviathan game must meet. We need individuals who inhabit a piece of land together and who may or may not create or abolish jurisdiction. Individuals must therefore be able to (refuse to) enter into an agreement that designates a sovereign (individual or institution) who/that…

  • Modeling the State of Nature

    Hobbes’ Leviathan is written in separate paragraphs. Chapters XIII (of the natural state of humanity, regarding their happiness and misery) & XIV (of the first and second laws of nature and of contracts) have all the information needed to model that natural state in an agent-based system that mimics the behavior that Hobbes uses to…

  • Hobbes, Hofstadter, Feyerabend

    An exceptional company. Node puts them side by side to help him present his ABSM approach in a minute. Hobbes because he sees behavioral science as the collection of reproducible (demonstrably possible) results of valid working (reasoning) with and about observable situations, all based on fundamental behavioral laws. Here Hobbes makes a connection with Euclid…

  • Civil and Natural Philosophy

    We wrote earlier “[…] There is also no definite place for ABMS as a research method when it must come to fruition in ‘such a condition.’ […] For ABMS, that would mean that it should get off the ground in a state of methodological chaos, a general state of free struggle between the other research…

  • Agent-based modeling for political research

    This is part of a contribution to Section 63 of the ECPR 2020 conference. In terms of the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference (planned in Innsbruck) has become a “web thing”. Section 63 addresses the dynamics of political movements and thus also the research methods that go with them. Our assumption is that operational state structures…

  • Agent-based modeling for political culture theory application

    [ECPR2020 abstract] Section 63 of the ECPR 2020 conference aims at considering polity (state structure, -operation, and -dynamics) from the perspectives of political culture theory (focusing on attitudes, beliefs and sentiments that give order and meaning to polities) and associated research methodologies. Culture exists in networks (of top-down, peer-to-peer and bottom-up connections) in which individuals/citizens…