Procedural Models of Political Order

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0800

TL;DR

Opens from a modelling principle: a good model isolates the necessary and sufficient inputs for an outcome, and parsimony matters because individual-level noise - like irrational decisions in the homo oeconomicus model - often has no effect on macro-level, emergent outcomes.
Recaps the authors’ earlier two-model theory of political order: an Anglo-European model built on threat and protection, where followers hedge by backing the second-strongest actor, producing frequent leadership turnover and a “monopoly of legitimate violence”; against a Chinese model built on benevolence and redistribution, where followers back whoever offers the greatest livelihood benefit, producing a “monopoly of legitimate benevolence.”
To test these theories against charges of oversimplification, the authors built two agent-based simulations in which agents follow either the highest or second-highest surplus-times-generosity score, and found the simulations reproduced not just the predicted structures but unprogrammed emergent behaviours - increasingly long periods of stability over time, and faster network-rebuilding under economic hardship, matching predictions from the original classical texts.
The Chinese-model simulation converges on a single flat pyramid where a leader must maximise inequality with followers while minimising inequality among followers, since that configuration best resists internal challengers - a result the piece stresses emerges from selection among surviving configurations, since none of the agents are capable of any such reasoning themselves.
The Anglo-European-model simulation unexpectedly produces not genuinely separate competing parties but a single dominant bloc split into two or three internally similar factions, which the piece reads as a structural explanation for why establishment parties often converge and jointly resist independent outsiders, even when voters might benefit from real competition.
Both models are used to argue that political structure is defined by follower selection rules rather than leader intent, extended to explain why transplanted foreign political systems tend to either collapse or become disguised copies of the pre-existing order, with the Enlightenment and the Warring States shift toward meritocracy singled out as rare successful reforms because they redirected existing tendencies rather than rewriting agents’ preferences outright, and benefited both agents and system at once.

Key Takeaways

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Procedural Models of Political Order