If you are asking about network research specifically, the application is in understanding how the the structure of human relationships contribute to their collective decision making. In political science, our primary concern is studying these collective decision, such as legislation, war, trade, etc; therefore, the network component is critical. Developing models of how these structures form can help inform our understanding of how structure contributes to collective action.I would highly recommend following his work as he's a lot better at this stuff than I am. Reading this, I am inspired to read up on networks after I return from my research position in El Paso this summer.
My personal interest is in how adversarial structures, such as terrorist networks, form and act. For this subject, I recommend subject is “Leaderless Jihad” by Marc Sageman.
More generally, my focus at ZIA is to explore how formal methods can be applied to questions of national security, for which there is a lengthy literature.
Showing posts with label political science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political science. Show all posts
Formal Methods
Drew Conway, who authors one of my favorite blogs Zero Intelligence Agents. Posted an interesting entry on fractal network growths. Its worth a read. In the comments, I asked him how his research in networks applies to political science and he responded:
Political Science's role in society.
This is a discussion of the future of the profession of political science. Maybe I'll expand the focus of this blog to make it slightly more scholarly and try to eliminate the pomp. We will see as the blog matures what directions we want to go in, until then I highly recommed watching this discussion by two academics.
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