Anticipative and Anticipatory Systems in Political Science: A Prospect on Computational Political Science

This paper aims at providing a working definition of the notions “computational political science” and “computational political culture” in the research areas of IR, security studies, and conflict studies. ‘Computational Political Science’ is a term denoting the interdisciplinary area of computational, modelling and simulation research approaches to political science in a similar manner with the Computational Social Science (Cioffi-Revilla, 2010). Combined with social and cultural research, this interdisciplinary area has initially focused on the domain of IR addressing mainly the complexity of the targeted realms, like polities, conflict scenarios, relations between states, and state dynamics (Axelrod, 1997; Cederman, 1997; Epstein & Axtell, 1996; Cioffi-Revilla, 2010; Cioffi-Revilla and Rouleau, 2009). Though not properly defined as a disciplinary domain, this research area has been developed by means of interdisciplinary research methodologies based on the advanced technologies of the artificial, especially agent-based modelling and simulation systems, and complex adaptive systems. Our approach makes the distinction between two research paradigms which have been often addressed during the past decade in political science: ‘anticipative systems’, and ‘anticipatory systems’. The anticipative paradigm provides for the definition and construction of anticipative systems as artificial systems (i.e., computational or simulation systems reproducing real systems and their environments) able of prediction over the development and characteristic behavior of real systems. In such artificial system, be it a system of equations as well as an agent-based system, prediction and the predictive capacities are essentially achieved by means of cybernetic principles of the construction of such artificial systems. Such systems could be reflexive or only reactive. The anticipatory paradigm instead provides for the definition and construction of anticipatory systems as artificial systems (i.e., computational or simulation systems reproducing real systems and their environments) with essential reflexive capacities able to reproduce the dynamic behavior of real systems by taking into account their internal models of the real world, their reflexiveness, and also their capacity to foresee future contextual developments. Our approach aims at identifying and collecting knowledge and data from a comprehensive research literature review in support of the object, the method, the goal, and the essential characteristics of a prospective definitional approach of the interdisciplinary domain of Computational Political Science starting from the notion of Computational Political Culture (Voinea, 2016). We show how the political science research has expressed during the past 2-3 decades either implicitly or explicitly the need for advanced research methodologies able to provide for the understanding of the complex political and IR environments, situations, and evolutions.