Predicting Political Systems Using Economic, Environmental, and Relational Variables
Journal Title: Social Evolution & History - Year 2016, Vol 15, Issue 2
Abstract
This article continues the elaboration of a multiple factor model for predicting the political systems that emerge in specific economic, environmental and relational contexts. While anthropologists have long sought to describe the emergence of ‘the state’ or of modern bureaucracies, only recently have predictive models of political systems begun to emerge. Political scientists have long upheld the ideology that ‘democratic’ political systems can simply be exported or created, independent of the economic and environmental context as well as the realities of military power of one's neighbors, or that systems where the contexts have changed can still be called ‘democratic’ even though none of the conditions or attributes of such systems continue to exist. The causal arrow for predicting political systems appears to be in reverse of the ideological dogma of contemporary social sciences that generally seeks to deny the principles of evolutionary adaptation. Political systems appear to arise historically as a function of contextual variables and not independent of them, though technologies that today can refashion ecosystems and economies can also establish some types of (mostly authoritarian) political systems. The science of politics in this piece presents an alternative to the ideological (and theological, anti-evolutionary) approaches of contemporary ‘political science’.
Authors and Affiliations
David Lempert
Keywords
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