Artificial Political Culture Model[1]

Conceptualization and Anticipatory Modelling

Camelia Florela Voinea

European Research Center for Political Culture

Department of Public Policy, International Relations and Security Studies

Faculty of Political Science

University of Bucharest

Romania

camelia.voinea@unibuc.ro

Abstract

In political science in general and in political methodology in particular, the study of value change is often viewed as providing the main arguments concerning the quality of a democracy. In Eastern European democracies, the study of values in relationship to the study of the quality of democracy provides support to the idea that notwithstanding the importance of economic factor, the political culture factors might play a decisive role. Our approach is aimed at providing a complexity-based framework for the study of the political systems as anticipatory systems based on an internal model consisting of a value set. Our approach is aimed at providing arguments in favor of the idea that the dynamics of a political system is essentially influenced by the value change processes. The paper defines a polity as a political system with anticipatory characteristics which is based on a political culture internal model. In turn, the political culture is modelled as an artificial political culture system which operates as an internal model for a political system (polity). The paper starts from Schwartz’s value theory (Schwartz, 1992, 2005, 2012) which is based on a set of universal values. Our basic assumption is that the value orientation of an individual agent changes. From a mathematical point of view, the current position of a value orientation locates an individual agent in the values space. It is this value orientation which changes, thus providing for the emergence of mass political participation processes which would finally influence the polity dynamics.

Keywords: conceptualization, modelling, constructivism, political methodology, political system, artificial polity, artificial political culture, anticipatory systems

Introduction

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Eastern European post-communist regimes are undergoing a complex process of democratization. Though initially characterized by a considerably high level of optimism, confidence, highest expectations and trust in democracy, the process of democratization proves difficult and fuels strong controversies concerning the type and quality of democracy achieved by the countries involved in this transformation. Economic, social, and political theories have provided explanations of this process at both individual countries level and at the geopolitical level. However, as many authors noted, the transition toward democracy could be hardly explained by means of economic and political arguments only. More often, students of the Eastern European countries’ democratization focus on the political culture of these ex-communist societies and relate it in more complex ways to people’s perceptions and expectations of democracy, and to the type and quality of democracy in these countries. These and other considerations, like the necessity to take into consideration the impact of internet socialization technologies on people’s political perceptions and believes, have brought political culture theory back to the attention of scholars. This would not be the first time it happens and, surely, not the last, given its immense explanatory potential.

Notwithstanding its strong comeback, and obviously constrained by its own matters of fundamental concern, the political culture theory could only give a qualitative account of the ongoing change in the Eastern European regimes. Huge amounts of survey data succeeded to enhance the understandings of this change, but no operational account has been provided so far. The reasons are quite complex, and they have been sought in both its conceptual unfolding and its capacity to enhance operationalization by employing experimental computational and generative approaches based on the simulation with artificial technologies. As a difference from the social sciences, political culture theory proves resistance to the employment of research methodologies mainly based on the advanced computational and simulation technologies, like the agent-based systems, complex adaptive systems, and artificial societies (Voinea, 2016). Notwithstanding several relevant attempts to overcome this resistance and “push” the political methodology forward on its way toward the technologies of the artificial (Huckfeldt, Johnson and Sprague, 2002; Kim, Lodge and Taber, 2009), political culture theory remains still an outsider in what concerns its capacity to develop interdisciplinary methodological research. It is precisely here where we try to make our contribution to the evaluation of the ongoing process of democratization in the Eastern Europe.

In this paper our aim is to employ both anticipatory systems and agent-based simulation systems with the explicit goal to put at work the main models which dominate the Eastern European democratization research area: political culture theory (Almond and Verba, 1963), embedded democracy model (Merkel, 2004), and emancipative values model (Welzel, 2013). Though mainly qualitative, however supported by strong empirical evidence, these three models do emphasize but, unfortunately, do not operationalize the impact of political culture on the political change process toward democratization in Eastern Europe. What they actually do is to provide a considerable support toward replacing the traditional rational choice paradigm in explaining the ongoing Eastern European democratization process with another paradigm: the complexity paradigm.

The paper is organized as follows: Introduction presents the research issue and a brief research literature review and describes the aims of the approach. A brief comparative analysis is provided such that previous structural-functional agent-based modelling approaches of artificial political culture and artificial polity (Voinea, 2016a, 2017) are compared with the present models of polity and political culture. Section 2 describes the research questions in this approach which concern the definition of a political culture system as an anticipatory system based on an internal model consisting of a set of values, and the modelling of political culture system as an anticipatory system. Section 3 introduces a political methodology point of view on modelling both polity and political culture as anticipatory systems. Section 4 presents the conceptual modelling of an artificial political culture. Section 5 presents the preliminary conclusions and the limitations of the current approach, revealing the preliminary conclusions and orientations of future research work which are described in Section 6.

Political Culture Research Methodologies: From Empirical Evidence to Simulation-Based Modelling

The theories about anticipatory systems have revealed a new paradigm of research which is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between complex systems (living as well as non-living). Such systems employ the internal models in their own operation and dynamics, and in the interaction with their environments.

During the past decade, political anticipation with respect to geopolitical areas in a multipolar world has acquired substantial consideration in the political science, international relations, and security studies areas. By constructing political scenarios with predictive capabilities, political anticipation has been defined and employed as the means to overcome (desirable or non-desirable) potential evolutions of political crises or confrontations of various types, to mention but few of the situations which have required with necessity the elaboration of instruments and procedures with which they can be approached.

In the area of political methodology, anticipative systems research has lately included computational modelling and agent-based simulation systems which have been developed for their predictive capabilities in domains like financial forecasting, decision-making under risk, resilient social systems against external threat, biological and epidemiological control concerned with food security and pandemics.

Anticipatory systems are but one of the research areas which have also been in the focus in various areas like mathematics (Dubois, 1998), and computational social science (Leydesdorff, 2008). As a difference from the anticipative systems which have been primarily developed and employed for their predictive capacities, the domain of anticipatory systems is concerned with their conceptual definition and characteristics, mathematical formalism, and applications to a wide variety of areas of concern from nature to society and polity. Political culture could not escape this condition since individual as well as collective (mass) attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, mass emotional phenomenology in connection to political power, policy or dynamic political contexts are at the heart of political culture research. These issues are often connected to crisis situations in social and political environments. The dynamics of complex social and political systems could achieve evolutions and reach situation in which control might become ineffective and social and political crises could not be avoided. In order to approach such situation, anticipatory systems are studied for their capacity to reveal, explain or reproduce in simulation media the behavior of complex social and political systems and, therefore, recommend approaches aimed at avoiding crisis situations.

This paper approaches the anticipatory condition and characteristics of the political culture backgrounds and dynamics, the state (polity) operation and dynamics, and the dynamics of the relationship between political culture and polity. Background concepts in political culture theory, like attitudes, are approached from an anticipatory system view. Our approach aims at describing both polity and political culture as anticipatory systems and reveal the classic roots of this approach. Polities as well as political culture entities, like attitudes, beliefs, values, affect, feelings, and behaviors are re-considered in terms of anticipatory systems. The approach is an attempt to show that polities and political cultures can be defined as structurally coupled systems such that a polity has one or several internal models which guide its operation and make it achieve anticipatory capabilities (Voinea, 2021a, 2021b).

Modelling the relationship between the citizens and the state: Polity and Political Culture

This paper introduces a conceptualization from a political methodology point of view of the modelling of a political culture as anticipatory system. To this aim, the models presented in this paper address two main research paradigm on anticipatory systems: Rosen’s theory on anticipatory systems (1985), and Dubois’ theory on anticipatory systems, incursion and hyperincursion (1998), and research approaches on the theory of anticipation based on philosophy of science (Poli, 2010), and modelling and simulation of anticipatory systems with agent-based models (Leyesdorff, 2003, 2008).

The research issue of value change has been approached from multiple perspectives employing theories which combine psychology, social-psychology, political psychology, and political culture theory. Our paper starts from the assumption that in social and political systems the political culture essentially influences both political regime and political participation. In order to explain these issues, our paper approaches the political culture in two modelling approaches: as an anticipatory system in the sense defined by Rosen (1985), and in the sense defined by Dubois (1998).

The anticipative dimension in the political culture theory has been initially emphasized by Almond and Verba in their seminal work, The Civic Culture (1963: p. 353).

The idea of this approach started from a comparative qualitative analysis of the research approaches on political culture: Converse’s model (1963) identifies the roots of political change in political beliefs (ideology). Other value-based modelling approaches on human development (Inglehart and Welzel, 2005; Inglehart, 2007; Welzel, 2013) identify the roots of political change in political attitudes as the capability of “voicing” freedoms and other rights. Apparently, the political culture shifts its focus from ideology to (social and political) participation – a situation highly stimulated and enhanced in our times by the virtual media. Hence, artificial culture becomes more a matter of bottom-up construction (since it is based in individual interactions and mass perceptions) rather than a top-down construction (if it is mainly based in ideology). In this case, we try to prove that artificial cultures would rather simulate value and belief change as the engine of major political change than simulate a rational choice scenario with partisanship as its main dimension. Collective action as participation becomes more effective and meaning-generating matrix than collective action as ideology-based propaganda.

Conceptual Modelling of an Artificial Political Culture

This paper introduces the concept of artificial political culture. It is a dynamic simulation modelling approach which aims at re-producing and explaining political culture formation, adaptation and change within an artificial polity. Explanatory approach is not reported in this paper.

The research reported in this paper concerns various paradigms of designing an artificial political culture. While an artificial culture model called synthetic culture has been defined and developed as an interdisciplinary research approach at the border between psychology, sociology, classic system theory, artificial intelligence, and agent-based modelling and simulation (Hofstede and Pedersen, 1999; Hofstede, Pedersen and Hofstede, 2002), there is no theoretical and operational modelling and simulation research approach on political culture as an anticipatory system.

The original contribution of the research reported in this paper concerns the classes (definitions) of political cultures as anticipatory systems in two different views, that is Rosen’s (Rosen,1985), and Dubois’ (Dubois, 1998), and the development of associated artificial political culture models as complex adaptive systems with anticipatory characteristics. The conceptual architecture of each of these classes of models is employed in the design of an agent-based modelling and simulation system such that the Artificial Political Culture Model (APCM) could be studied both as an independent modelling research matter and combined with the study of political participation in an Artificial Polity Model (APM, Voinea, 2021b).

The conceptual classes of architectures of an artificial political culture are based on the definitions of a political culture in two theories on anticipatory systems.

Rosen’s theory assumes that a system is called ‘anticipatory’ if it contains a model whose predictive capabilities are employed by the system itself to guide its own dynamics and evolution (Rosen, 1985: p. 341).

Dubois defines an anticipatory system as a “finite difference equation system where the future state of the system S and the model M at time t+Dt is a function F of this system S at time t and of the model M at a later time step t+Dt.” (Dubois, 1998: eq. 2a and 2b).

Based on Dubois’ definition of an anticipatory system, my approach identifies two types of anticipatory systems which are employed in the design of an artificial political culture model: (i) horizontal, as defined and approached by Leydesdorff and Dubois (2004) and Leydesdorff (2008) with respect to social systems as anticipatory systems, and (ii) hierarchical architecture, which is introduced in this paper.

Following the classic definition of political culture (Almond and Verba, 1963: p.12), the conceptual architecture of an artificial political culture includes sub-systems, like the political attitudes, beliefs, and values sub-systems. Inspired and based on a functionally differentiated approach of social systems as anticipatory systems (Leydesdorff, 2003, 2008; Leydesdorff and Dubois, 2004), the artificial political culture system could thus be defined as consisting in three meaning-producing and meaning-processing sub-systems which develop on horizontal, each of them providing a convergent contribution to the current state of the system itself (see Figure 1). The contribution of each sub-system to the state of the system has been described by Leydesdorff (2008).

Following the classic definition of political culture as based on political attitudes towards state institutions and public policy, a second conceptual architecture of an artificial political culture has been inspired by the definition of attitudes (Allport, 1935). In this class of architectures, the artificial political culture system consists of several sub-systems which are hierarchically imbricated, such that political attitude sub-system is an anticipatory system itself with an internal model, that is, the belief system, and in turn, the belief system is defined as an anticipatory system with a value system as its internal model.

All these sub-systems are meaning-producing systems which have a hierarchical contribution to the current state of the system which employs each such sub-system as an internal model of itself (see Figure 2).

In this type of architecture, the sub-systems play different roles, like stabilization and destabilization of the main system. A stabilizer sub-system, like for example the value sub-system, plays the role of reinforcing the stability of the system which employs it as an internal model of itself, while a destabilizer sub-system, like for example the cognition sub-system, plays the role of decreasing the degree of dynamic stability of the system which employs it as an internal model of itself (Voinea, 2021c). The hierarchical contribution of weak anticipatory sub-systems have been inspired by the hierarchical structure suggested for the (political) attitudes and beliefs which are based on an unique value set (Schwarz, 1992, 2005, 2012), but their relationship is defined by explicit generative roles (Rokeach, 1968, 1973) distributed amongst them at different moments of time and at different time scales: the attitudes could be generated and dynamically changed based on a dynamically changing belief set, while beliefs could become ‘values’ once they get a stable position inside the belief set on the long-term. These types of dynamic relationship between beliefs and value sets have been approached in an earlier paper (Voinea, 2015).

The operational shift of political culture’ structural components from one role to another inside the operational structure of a host system over short time intervals could provide for the emergence of instability and chaos in the host system. It is therefore useful that the hierarchical contribution of sub-systems in an anticipatory system could be described by a mathematical model able to specify this dynamic change such that a state at a future moment of time (t+1) of a sub-system could be taken into consideration by the system itself for the development of its current state at time t.

Hierarchically imbricated sub-systems in an anticipatory system brings to the front several complexity issue, like the time scales of each sub-system, the meaning producing, communicating, and processing in each sub-system and between these and the system itself. Such a contribution is asynchronously distributed in the hierarchy of the sub-systems and its transfer to the current state of the system could make a significant change to the mathematical model of anticipatory systems with incursion and hyperincursion (Dubois, 1998) since this model does not take into consideration the architecture of the anticipatory system, nor does it take into consideration the architecture and time scale of the different sub-systems in the case when they are hierarchically distributed.

This paper introduces a possible approach to this issue by defining the levels of vertical / hierarchical imbrication of the sub-systems (internal models) in the meaning-processing architecture of the system, and by defining the transfer of meaning between such sub-systems (internal models) which operate at different time scales. The approach suggests that the level of imbrication should condition the capacity of the anticipatory system to synchronize its own internal models which operate at different time scales such that the synchronization is made possible at each moment of time when the sub-system with the smallest time scale makes a meaning-processing outcome available and the sub-system with the largest time scale makes a meaning-processing ready for meaning-communication. In other words, meaning is finally transferred to the system itself as soon as the largest time scale sub-system(s) has / have processed it and is / are ready to communicate it.

This rather difficult convergence between systems with different time scales are easily managed in a lattice-like system architecture. Since all internal models of the political culture – attitudes, beliefs, values – could be defined as open-lattice architectures, and since the value system (that is, the basic internal model to a political culture as most stable and finite set) has a closed-lattice architecture (Voinea, 2020b), the imbrication of internal models in an anticipatory system could be easily transformed into a priority-based scheduling of synchronization in meaning processing and communication systems.

One possible design option for the artificial political culture as an anticipatory system could be based on a minimal architecture of internally, hierarchically imbricated subsystems such as the soke-architecture (Voinea, 2016b) where a soke[2] contains attitude, belief, value, and cognition components.

The Artificial Political Culture Model (APCM) is designed with the goal of the operationalization of the conceptual modelling of the artificial political culture as an anticipatory system. Operationalization is based on the notion of value orientations.

A value orientation is defined as the strength of a value in the value set (sub-system). Value orientations are updated at each time step such that the processing and communication of meaning has a dynamically effect on modifying the value orientations.

The Artificial Political Culture Model (APCM) is a bottom-up approach to value orientations change dynamics. It Is an agent-based simulation model. The value orientations change as individual agents interact in a social and political environment. The value-orientation of an individual agent as well as mass value orientations is influenced by the dynamic balance between active value orientations described by the values situated on the orthogonal dimensions in the universal set of values (Schwartz, 2012). The dynamics of this balance situation is sensitive to factors like information, belief update, social influence, and emotions.

The experimental model is an agent-based model employed in the simulation of value change in several scenarios in which value orientation maps are generated such that the meaning-processing of such maps is communicated to an artificial polity system with anticipatory characteristics.

Expected performances and limitations of the approach

The performances of the Artificial Political Culture Model in the horizontal multiple sub-system architecture are influenced by the generation and employment of the value orientation maps in the simulation data: value orientation maps are generated on an empirical basis however they are adjusted when empirical data is missing as happens with the survey data on the Welzel Emancipative Values (source: WVS database). Value orientation maps are a solution for the situations when not only empirical data is missing, but also for the situations in which the transfer of meaning is depending on the codification and meaning communication between horizontally distributed sub-systems.

More simulation scenarios need to be performed in order to make the APC Model reveal all its conceptual and technical difficulties.

The artificial political culture proves anticipatory capabilities when employed in the studies of polity operation. The limitations of the approach concern the simulation framework and are mainly determined by the limitations of the agent-based systems.

Conclusions and further developments

The artificial political culture as an anticipatory system requires new programming concepts and principles in order to provide support for the simulation of self-referential systems, meaning generation and meaning communication systems. Further developments are designed to cover these areas of research.

An artificial political culture simulation model achieves the dynamics of political culture in terms of the dynamics of the values, (political) beliefs, and political attitudes for which it is defined. The model aims to explain relevant political issues, like political participation and support for democracy in the Eastern European geopolitical area after the 1990s. It studies the dynamics of value change, the relationships between the dynamics of beliefs and the change in the political attitudes toward the state (polity), society, and governance. It proves essential for the understanding of the design of the political reforms which are pending in the Eastern Europe: even more than an economic approach pointing to the crises which have severely affected the whole Europe and, ultimately, the whole world, the democratic pathway in the Eastern European countries is pending a political cultural operational approach.

I have been inspired in this research approach by the study of the political culture legacy – as complicated as the very history of the Eastern Europe – which marks the difficult separation from the communist past (Rose, Mishler and Haerpfer, 1998) in the post-communist societies in the eastern half of Europe after the fall of Berlin Wall. Moreover, it is the role of political culture in the making of the new democracies in the Eastern Europe.

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Notes:

[1] This paper is a modified version of the initial paper accepted and presented at the 78^th MPSA’2021 Virtual International Conference, Paper Session 50: “Challenges to Standard Models of Democratization”, 15 April 2021 (MPSA Repository). This paper version presents the issue of conceptualizing the ‘artificial political culture’ and introduces the notion of ‘anticipatory modelling’ in relation to the concept of political culture with reference to the book by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, “The Civic Culture” (1964). Since the experimental aspects as well as the outcomes of the simulations stage have been updated, revised, and further developed with respect to the research stage reported in the paper presented at the 78^th MPSA’2021 Virtual International Conference, Paper Session 50 in April 2021, all these aspects are presented in a separate paper (forthcoming).

[2] The term ‘soke’ has been chosen such as to denote a ‘social kernel’ and has been originally defined and introduced in Voinea (2016b).