political science essay

political science essay

The Evolution of Political Systems: A Comprehensive Analysis

1. Introduction to Political Science and Its Importance

The methods used in collecting, utilizing, and making the information available are varied. Broad political decisions are made by governments to intervene in the economy in an attempt to promote stability, efficiency, and equity. More specifically, those rules define the functioning of a political regime and explain why different people within an economy have different access to those decision-making bodies. The most important rules governing the public realm are laid out in a group of collective decision-making bodies called political regimes. These are to be distinguished from the institutional procedures embodied in the regulations that govern private economic transactions.

In a simple sense, all social science could be understood as the analysis of the various methods that individuals use to make decisions based on the balance between the costs and benefits of a given choice. Economics is best understood as the analysis of individuals’ economic decisions based formally on costs and benefits, but those rules are implied by the possibility of manipulating goods and services to achieve welfare for the economic agent. Political science deals with the creation and implementation of policy, as well as the rules that bind economic agents in their decision making. To understand economic decision making, why information and resource allocation is done both privately and collectively, one must understand the rules within which economic agents work. The goal of political scientists in analyzing broad categories of political systems is to understand these institutions as a method for both solving coordination or collective activity problems and the provision of public goods.

2. Historical Development of Political Systems

Political systems exhibit a notable ability to change and evolve. Think, for example, about the spread of democracy. Table II.1 reports the number of democracies in the world, as defined by Freedom House, in 1950 and 2000; there is an increase from 10 to 89. Such changes are often subtle, and the time span of fifty years or so in our tables is clearly far too short to capture many of the dynamics historically occurring in political systems. Indeed, the dynamics of political systems embrace movement both between different forms of democracy and between different forms of tyranny. Our background material presents a brief treatment of the historical development of political systems. We will cover developments in our idea of what political systems do in the next chapter.

The systematic study of political institutions has a long history. Political philosophy—embodied in, for example, the texts of Plato, Aristotle, and Machiavelli—long antedates systematic, objective study of political institutions such as the institution of property rights, and of political systems such as democracy. However, as pointed out in the Mellon lectures to be reproduced in the following chapter of this volume, political philosophy provides a platform on which to build a systematic, objective economics of political institutions that we believe enhances our understanding of how political institutions affect development.

3. Modern Political Ideologies and Movements

In this present paper, as an application of the idea, I show how studies of these foundations can be applied to describe modern political systems and ideologies more particularly. We see the cohesion and tensions to be found in different forms of ideology and look at the growth and potential of some ideologies that seem widespread today. Now specialized players can go further and create definitive statements of the function which pretty much determine dynamics, given the state of knowledge on the day.

We considered political needs and real-world rationality on the one hand in a potential electorate, and we saw there was a lack of complete information or information control on the part of any government. We then tried to link a political ideology to this by examining the influences on the stock of knowledge in society and on access to policy-making. Finally, we wondered how such an ideology might evolve and attract a following in the light of switching costs and assessed some implications for totalitarianism and contemporary societies.

In this paper on the subject, I explained rational self-interest and a political system on the one hand and a political ideology on the other in terms of some standard considerations in economic analysis and used the result to understand various political systems.

As I try to understand the current political situation, and yet I find the ordinary materials of political analysis shallow and unsatisfactory for doing so, I have been making greater efforts to study the foundations of political movements. I have found a systematic approach to be much more informative than is the poll-based and anecdotal account found in newspapers or in election campaign and financial analysis, which are oriented towards the day-to-day and the specific purposes of the analysts.

4. Comparative Analysis of Different Political Systems

The suggested approach is rather successful, not only in helping to make historically reliable political and foreign policy analyses, but also in showing pupils of their classical European political school that classical Greece and classical Rome had the same political system. Furthermore, it demonstrates that Russia had the highest demonstration of the system and was even able to teach Europe the advanced daily application of polyarchy and separation of powers.

In the section, a two-step approach is suggested. In the first step, a new method of networks of measurements is used to represent political conditions in the past. This method reveals explicit similarities between the historical Roman Republic, medieval Russian Principalities, and despotic states. In the second step, the suggested nets representing power similarity azimuths for Leo III and Cornelia, as well as Louis XIV and Maria Theresa, are compared. It is shown that the political system in Rome during the times of Cinncinatus, Scipio, and Cato, and in the early period of the Russian state, as accepted in Russian history, does not correspond to the different demonstration classic European model political systems of these periods. Instead, it represents a world system comprising both old Greek and new European manifestations of despotism. This system was revolutionally offered for practical policy by Gaius Gracchus and implemented by Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Julius Caesar, Rodulf, and Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus.

5. Conclusion: Future Trends in Political Science

The logic of model dilution through time we have observed can be illustrated with the known adage of the differences between the medicine man and the magician: in the earlier periods, the magic man performed a relatively coherent system of “services” to the Social Whole, whereas in the contemporary epoch only a very limited number of the shaman’s functions survive. The shrinkage in the degree of self-sufficiency of naturalistic models of political systems in the comprehensive realization of functions associated with stable existential parameters and systems of individual and systemic-protectionist political and thermodynamic optimization can be well demonstrated with the history of the information revolution, the highest point in a series in which the toolkit of Denmark (to name but one effectively functioning socio-political naturalistic system), all of the ensemble of the traditions of Denmark had been transcended.

We have carried out an analysis of models of political systems in the course of their history and have distinguished four major phases of their historical trajectory. Despite the overarching impression of gradual transition from naturalistic hydraulic models to modern cybernetic ones, we believe the specifics of these models produce insurmountable obstacles for the construction of an orthodox evolutionary theory in political science. One of the most important arguments against this is the achievement by naturalistic models of sufficient stably functioning systems, which required a qualitatively different theoretical framework from what is currently attested in the political science literature. Other aspects of the relationship of political systems and their levels to macro-political systems, the anticipated future of ontological properties, have also challenged orthodox evolutionary theories in political science. Our reflexive position in this study is characteristic of autopoietic systems themselves: we here lay down five key challenges to the temple of political evolutionary science around which future research can potentially be circulated.