Politics and Uncertainty: Theory, Models and Applications - Hardcover

Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521581214 ISBN 13: 9780521581219

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Uncertainty is an ever-present and ineradicable aspect of politics, affecting all important issues of governance and policy. Rather than treating the uncertainty of politics as a mystery, this book provides an original and direct treatment of political uncertainty as a scientifically-knowable phenomenon. The author shows how probability and mathematical modeling can play a central role in understanding a range of complex and fundamental issues in both domestic and international politics.

About this title

About the Author

Claudio Cioffi-Revilla is the Professor of Computational Social Science, founding & former Chair of the Department of Computational Social Science, and founding & current Director of the Center for Social Complexity at George Mason University. He holds two doctoral degrees in Political Science and International Relations and his areas of expertise include quantitative, mathematical, and simulationmethods  applied to complex human and social systems.
He  teaches courses on Origins of Social Complexity, Complexity Theory for Computational Social Science, and Introduction to CSS. He has taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and University of Colorado at Boulder, holding visiting appointments and lectureships overseas. In 2002 he founded the Mason Ph.D. program in Computational Social Sciences, the first program in the country with this specific focus.
Dr. Cioffi's research on conflict, international relations, and social complexity has been funded by DARPA, NSF, ONR, NATO, and European research agencies. He serves at the State Department, Office of Geographic and Global Issues & Humanitarian Information Unit, as a Jefferson Science Fellow of the National Academy of Science since 2006, applying models of risk assessment and advanced social science methodologies. Elected member of the Cosmos Club of Washington, DC; President of the North American Association for Computational Social Sciences (2008-2010); and Executive Committee Member of the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University. Published five books and over seventy peer-reviewed publications. Appointed Associate Scientist by the Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History since 2008.

His current projects include NSF- and DOD-funded research on complex crises and humanitarian assistance/disaster response. Dr. Cioffi lives in Washington, DC.

Review

"This is a profound book. It seeks to explore the basic configurations of political reality and expose its inherently uncertain foundations. In this, its central mission, it succeeds. It is also an ambitious book in seeking to lay the foundaitons for both micropolitical and macropolitical analysis. ...Cioffi-Revilla has given us a splendid essay on political uncertainty. He has presented a unique way of systematically decomposing political events into their constituent structures and highlighting the nature of their uncertainty in ways that enrich our understanding of politics." Manus I Midlarsky, American Political Science Review

"Claudio Cioffi-Revilla ranks high among political theorists who advise the use of mathematics to make political science more precise and scientific. Politics and Uncertainty couples politics with randomness, from which it follows that mathematical models can make what is improbable predictable." Bertil L. Hanson, Perspectives on Political Science

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521581214
• ISBN 13: 9780521581219
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 364