Taking evolution seriously in political science

Abstract

In this essay, we explore the epistemological and ontological assumptions that have been made to make political science ''scientific.'' We show how political science has generally adopted an ontologically reductionist philosophy of science derived from Newtonian physics and mechanics. This mechanical framework has encountered problems and constraints on its explanatory power, because an emphasis on equilibrium analysis is ill-suited for the study of political change. We outline the primary differences between an evolutionary ontology of social science and the physics-based philosophy commonly employed. Finally, we show how evolutionary thinking adds insight into the study of political phenomena and research questions that are of central importance to the field, such as preference formation.

Complexity Theory in Political Science and Public Policy

“…6–7; see Klijn, 2008, p. 314, on ‘wicked’, or apparently intractable, policy problems). Many accounts also use it to challenge their idea of rational choice theory (Geyer and Rihani, 2010, p. 5; Lewis and Steinmo, 2008, pp. 15–20; 2010, p. 237; Little, 2008, pp.…”

“…Second, RCT and complexity can both be linked to the pursuit of evolutionary theory (albeit partly because this is an approach, like new institutionalism, with many variants). For example, Lewis and Steinmo (2008) use evolutionary arguments largely to reject RCT, but they also acknowledge (with reference to Axelrod, 1984) the value of evolutionary game theory and the centrality of the trial-and-error strategies of individuals to accounts of generational change in political science. 2 See also Klijn (2008) for a link to the literature on governance, multiple streams analysis and game theory.…”

How Proximate and ‘Meta-Institutional’ Contexts Shape Institutional Change: Explaining the Rise of the People's Bank of China

“…Historical, sociological and rational choice institutionalism typically applies heavy doses of institutional conditioning, ending up with essentially ‘structuralist’ or overly ‘sticky’ accounts of institutional life, depicting institutions as rule‐bound, highly constraining and as either resistant to change or as shaping change along defined paths. Building on earlier work that has given greater emphasis to institutionally situated agency (Campbell, ; Crouch, ; Lewis and Steinmo, ; Mahoney and Thelen, ; Streeck and Thelen, ; Thelen and Steinmo, ), Bell () presents an approach which emphasises that agents and institutions are mutually shaping over time. Bell () has recently extended this approach by emphasising the role of wider ‘meta‐institutional’ contexts in shaping institutional change.…”

Taking Evolution Seriously, or Metaphorically? A Review of Interactions between Historical Institutionalism and Darwinian Evolutionary Theory

“…Generalized Darwinism thus provides an overarching meta-theoretical framework which is useful and meaningful at an abstract rather than detail level (Aldrich et al, 2008;Hodgson, 2013;Hodgson and Knudsen, 2010). 3 In short, while Lewis and Steinmo's (2006) call for 'taking evolution seriously' can be seen as an attempt to raise the level of interaction between social and biological evolutionary theory from metaphor to analogy according to Cohen's hierarchy, in more recent years the two authors have moved beyond the metaphor-analogy mindset by reframing their analysis under the perspective of generalized Darwinism -an idea that does not rely on any assumption of metaphorical or analogous similarities or differences.…”