Anticipatory Systems in Political Anticipation Research

This paper addresses the issue of anticipatory system in political science in general and political anticipation in particular. To this aim, this paper makes a comparative analysis between the classic system theoretical background in political science and the current background and trends in the political anticipation studies, including anticipatory democracy and anticipatory governance. The approach suggests conceptual and operational aspects which must be taken into consideration for the appropriate definition and applications of anticipatory systems in political science and methodology. This approach introduces the concepts of political system, governance, and political culture from a comparative perspective between two system paradigms: cybernetic and complex. Moreover, the paper refers to the classic concept of political system (Easton, 1953; Parsons, 1951, 1963) and the new concept of anticipatory system’s definition (Rosen, 1985) in the sociological (Leydesdorff, 2005), philosophic (Poli, 2009), and mathematical sociology (Dubois, 1998; Dubois & Sabatier 1998; Leydesdorff and Dubois 2004; Louise, ) research literature and discusses it from a political methodology perspective (Voinea, 2021) such that anticipatory systems could be appropriately employed in the development of research concerning anticipatory democracy and anticipatory governance. The approach discusses an type of anticipatory system which has been developed in the political culture research (Voinea, 2021) such that it could combine in an interdisciplinary way the concepts of political culture (cultural values), system theory (cybernetic vs. complex), and the methodologies based on the sciences of the artificial, like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, which currently provide for the conceptual background in identifying how could anticipatory system be appropriately and efficiently employed in political science research.