Value Maps and the Dynamics of Political Participation: A Prospect on Computational Political Culture

This paper presents research approach and preliminary results in methodological studies of the populist wave in Eastern European countries. The research methodology is based on maps of cultural, social, and political values and beliefs (ideologies) called “value maps”. The research approach aims at developing interdisciplinary research methodology for the study of political phenomena, like populism, extremism, and conflict in IR and world politics. The approach addresses both conceptual, and experimental development of interdisciplinary research methodologies in the Political Methodology area by intensively employing advanced technologies like agent-based models, agent-based systems, and complex adaptive systems. The paper provides for a working definition of the concept and research area of Computational Political Culture. The term ‘Computational Political Culture’ has been initially employed to cover research in political culture areas like political attitudes, values, beliefs (ideologies), voting behavior and partisanship, political participation, and electoral studies (Voinea, 2016). The research methodology of value mappings has been previously employed and reported in the artificial political culture research (Voinea, 2021a, 2021b): the methodology is based on value mappings at individual level in a political environment and context, usually electoral campaigns, and voting. These individual value mappings (the empirical values) are loaded as inputs to an agent-based system which is employed in simulating the political environment’s dynamics of change. Country Case Studies: Hungary, Poland, and Romania. Political Party Case Studies: Fidesz (Hungary), PiS (Poland), and Great Romania Party (Romania). For these countries a set of data concerning the populist vote preference has been collected from a specialized database (ParlGov.org). For the value maps, a set of empirical data has been collected from the World Value Survey. The case studies have focused on two kinds of studies: (i) quantitative evaluations of the correlations between the two sets of empirical data, and (ii) simulation-based evaluations of the dynamic interdependence between value maps and voting preferences. Preliminary Results and Conclusions An agent-based model has been developed for the study of the factors which make societies and polities open to conflict (Voinea, 2021; Voinea, 2014). At experimental and case study level, the present paper shows pragmatic approaches on how this research area could be used for political forecasting in dynamic (volatile) situations. At the conceptual level, the paper aims at informing the development of a Political Methodology research branch especially in IR, Security Studies, Conflict Studies and State Dynamics research by means of employing interdisciplinary research, and the advanced technologies of the artificial.