Christoph Mohamad-Klotzbach - Böcker

Dynamics of Democratic Elections explores modeling approaches to democratic elections and opinion dynamics at the intersection of mathematics, political science, and computational modeling. The book focuses on relatively simple models, their analysis, and how they perform in real-world applications. In order to make the book easy to navigate, the material is divided into three major parts concerning ‘The Voter Model’, ‘Nonlinear Election Models’, and ‘Game Theoretical Models’. Although the material is unashamedly mathematical, the concepts are discussed in a way that should be accessible to anyone with a reasonably strong quantitative background and should prove interesting to a broad audience beyond mathematicians. FeaturesSuitable for graduate students and researchers (mathematicians, physicists, social and political scientists with a strong theoretical background)Step-by-step data preparation and analysisAbundant exercisesNumerous color illustrations

Dynamics of Democratic Elections explores modeling approaches to democratic elections and opinion dynamics at the intersection of mathematics, political science, and computational modeling. The book focuses on relatively simple models, their analysis, and how they perform in real-world applications. In order to make the book easy to navigate, the material is divided into three major parts concerning ‘The Voter Model’, ‘Nonlinear Election Models’, and ‘Game Theoretical Models’. Although the material is unashamedly mathematical, the concepts are discussed in a way that should be accessible to anyone with a reasonably strong quantitative background and should prove interesting to a broad audience beyond mathematicians. FeaturesSuitable for graduate students and researchers (mathematicians, physicists, social and political scientists with a strong theoretical background)Step-by-step data preparation and analysisAbundant exercisesNumerous color illustrations

The chapters present a wide variety of local actors who pursue different notions of order legitimized by local traditions based on hierarchy or deeply rooted communalism, Islamic theology, or grassroots democracy.

The chapters present a wide variety of local actors who pursue different notions of order legitimized by local traditions based on hierarchy or deeply rooted communalism, Islamic theology, or grassroots democracy.

The nucleus of society is situated at the local level: in the village, the neighborhood, the city district. This is where a community first develops collective rules that are intended to ensure its continued existence. The contributors look at such configurations in geographical areas and time periods that lie outside of the modern Western world with its particular development of society and statehood: in Antiquity and in the Global South of the present. Here states tend to be weak, with obvious challenges and opportunities for local communities. How does governance in this context work? Scholars from various disciplines (Classics, Theology, Political Science, Sociology, Social Anthropology, Human Geography, Sinology) analyze different kinds of local arrangements in case studies, and they do so with a comparative approach. The sixteen papers examine the scope and spatial contingency of forms of self-governance; its legitimization and the collective identity of the groups behind them; the relations to different levels of state governance as well as to other local groups. Overall, this volume makes an interdisciplinary contribution to a better understanding of fundamental elements of local governance and statehood.