Raw capture — raw/simpolitics.md

url: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/6166/SimPoliticsAmerica-s-Quest-to-Solve-Politics-with title: "SimPolitics: America's Quest to Solve Politics with Computers" author: Fenwick McKelvey date_fetched: 2026-07-11 date_published: 2026 publisher: The MIT Press isbn: 9780262053211 doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15585.001.0001 license: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

How computer models became fundamental to political practice—from winning elections to global affairs—and how we imagine political futures as a computing problem.

For more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics, Fenwick McKelvey traces the entwined history of politics and computers from the 1960s to the late 1980s. He shows how programmers, consultants, academics, political scientists, and peace activists all worked—sometimes in tandem, sometimes not—to build simulations to win campaigns, predict coups, forecast the future, and render politics as legible as a spreadsheet.

Drawing on novel archival and historical research, McKelvey recounts the history of efforts to simulate politics by building models of elections, voters, and international relations. Comparing attempts in the United States to simulate domestic electoral politics and international affairs, he reveals the unexamined connections and conflicts between the two projects. His book provides a helpful guide to taking stock of exaggerated claims that AI and technology will fix politics, while presenting the long history of such promised technological fixes.

Table of Contents

Part I: SimVoters - Chapter 3: Political Forecasting and the Scientific Study of Elections - Chapter 4: The Modeled American Voter - Chapter 5: Addressing American Voters

Part II: SimWorlds - Chapter 6: Make-Believe on Mathematical Principles - Chapter 7: The World on a Wire - Chapter 8: Worlding Models - Chapter 9: Are Other Computer Simulations Possible? - Chapter 10: Let X = X or the Legacies of a Computational Imaginary of Politics

Framing Chapters - Chapter 1: From 480 to 538: The Origins of the Computational Imaginary of Politics - Chapter 2: Models, Prototypes, and Imaginaries

About the Author

Fenwick McKelvey is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Codirector of the Applied AI Institute at Concordia University. He is the author of Internet Daemons and coauthor of The Permanent Campaign.

Series

Part of the MIT Press Information Policy Series. Open Access edition made possible by MIT Press Direct to Open.