The Next Big Thing Scale Invariance in Political Science
نویسنده
چکیده
‘Power laws’ suggest that events of a large magnitude will be rare, whilst small events will be much more common, and that a simple mathematical law relates ‘severity’ with frequency. We find that a wide variety of phenomena in political science are power law distributed. These empirical regularities are both unexpected and unexplained. More work on a general explanatory theory for these patterns is desirable. ∗University of Rochester, [email protected] I am very grateful to Aaron Clauset, Kevin Quinn and Curtis Signorino for helpful comments and advice. The usual caveat applies. 1 Samuel Alito was recently confirmed to fill the vacant US Supreme Court position left by Sandra Day O’Connor, but should we be surprised that it took the President two attempts to get the Senate’s assent to his choice? What kind of predictions can we give on the next democidal bloodletting by a despotic government? When, and to what extent, will governments respond to crises by launching undemocratic purges of their opposition? When alliances form in international relations—such as the “Coalition of the Willing” for Iraq—how large should we expect them to be? At least two themes unite these seemingly disparate research topics. First, they refer to extremely complicated political science phenomena which are generally difficult to accurately predict. Second, they show remarkable ‘scale invariance’, a property that relates the size of an event to its frequency. In this paper, it is shown that many familiar political science systems of actor interaction are well described and characterized by a simple mathematical relationship, known as the power law. More formally, we can write that
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تاریخ انتشار 2006