Bayesian Dynamical Systems Modelling in the Social Sciences

Ranganathan, Shyam; Spaiser, Viktoria; Mann, Richard P.; Sumpter, David J. T.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0086468

Cited by 51 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…For this, we assume a uniform, non-informative prior on the parameter space, so that every possible model coefficient is weighted equally (conditioned on the corresponding term being included in the submodel). This penalizes more complex models with larger number of terms as the dimension of the parameter space increases with increasing number of terms (see Ranganathan et al, 2014 for a fuller description of the approach).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The demographic transition and economic growth: implications for development policy

2015

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An important transition in the economic history of countries occurs when they move from a regime of low prosperity, high child mortality and high fertility to a state of high prosperity, low child mortality and low fertility. Researchers have proposed various theories to explain this demographic transition and its relation to economic growth. In this article, we test the validity of some of these theories by fitting a non-linear dynamic model for the available cross-country data. Our approach fills the gap between the micro-level models that discuss causative mechanisms but do not consider if alternative models may fit the data well, and models from growth econometrics that show the impact of different factors on economic growth but do not include non-linearities and complex interactions. In our model, mortality and fertility decline and economic growth are endogenized by considering a simultaneous system of equations in the change variables. The model shows that the transition is best described in terms of a development cycle involving child mortality, fertility and GDP per capita. Fertility rate decreases when child mortality is low, and is weakly dependent on GDP. As fertility rates fall, GDP increases, and as GDP increases, child mortality falls. We further test the hypothesis that female education drives down fertility rates rather than child mortality, but find only weak evidence for it. The Bayesian methodology we use ensures robust models and we identify non-linear interactions between indicators to capture real-world nonlinearities. Hence, our models can be used in policymaking to predict short-term evolutions in the indicator variables. We also discuss how our approach can be used to evaluate policy initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals or the Sustainable Development Goals and set more accurate, country-specific development targets.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The demographic transition and economic growth: implications for development policy

2015

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“…We remain here on a relative abstract level, noting however that standard country-specific indicators [17,18] for both democracy and values may be taken as proxies for D and V . Alternatively one may consider the level of economic development, instead of the cultural dimension, as the basic variable interacting with the state of the democracy [19].…”

Section: Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Entrenched time delays versus accelerating opinion dynamics: are advanced democracies inherently unstable?

Gros

2017

Eur. Phys. J. B

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Abstract. Modern societies face the challenge that the time scale of opinion formation is continuously accelerating in contrast to the time scale of political decision making. With the latter remaining of the order of the election cycle we examine here the case that the political state of a society is determined by the continuously evolving values of the electorate. Given this assumption we show that the time lags inherent in the election cycle will inevitable lead to political instabilities for advanced democracies characterized both by an accelerating pace of opinion dynamics and by high sensibilities (political correctness) to deviations from mainstream values. Our result is based on the observation that dynamical systems become generically unstable whenever time delays become comparable to the time it takes to adapt to the steady state. The time needed to recover from external shocks grows in addition dramatically close to the transition. Our estimates for the order of magnitude of the involved time scales indicate that socio-political instabilities may develop once the aggregate time scale for the evolution of the political values of the electorate falls below 7-15 months.

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“…These methods include frequency counts, a graphical representation of observed changes that can be compared to expected changes, dependency analyses inspired by the logic of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (Ragin 1987, Rihoux andRagin 2009) as well as evolutionary biology (Sillén-Tullberg 1993), and Bayesian dynamical systems Ranganathan et al 2014). This combination of methods is especially useful when determining reform sequences or investigating if there are differences in reform paths between, for example, successful and unsuccessful attempts at, for example, democratization.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating Sequences in Ordinal Data: A New Approach With Adapted Evolutionary Models

Lindenfors¹,

Jansson²,

Wang³

et al. 2018

PSRM

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Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to the conceptualization and measurement of democracy. It is co-hosted by the University of Gothenburg and University of Notre Dame. With a V-Dem Institute at University of Gothenburg that comprises almost ten staff members, and a project team across the world with four Principal Investigators, fifteen Project Managers, 30+ Regional Managers, 170 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 2,500 Country Experts, the V-Dem project is one of the largest-ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.Please address comments and/or queries for information to:

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Bayesian Dynamical Systems Modelling in the Social Sciences

Cited by 51 publications

References 36 publications

The demographic transition and economic growth: implications for development policy

The demographic transition and economic growth: implications for development policy

Entrenched time delays versus accelerating opinion dynamics: are advanced democracies inherently unstable?

Investigating Sequences in Ordinal Data: A New Approach With Adapted Evolutionary Models

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