SimPolitics: America's Quest to Solve Politics with Computers

Fenwick McKelvey traces the entwined history of politics and computer simulation from the 1960s through the late 1980s. He examines how programmers, consultants, political scientists, and peace activists built models to win elections, predict coups, and forecast political futures — part of a broader effort to render politics as computationally legible.

The book is organized into two halves. Part I: SimVoters covers the simulation of domestic electoral politics — the forecasting models, the "modeled American voter," and the tools developed to address and target voters. Part II: SimWorlds turns to international relations, tracing attempts to simulate global affairs on computers, from early mathematical principles through networked world models.

McKelvey draws on archival research to reveal unexamined connections between the domestic and international simulation projects. He argues that the long history of promised technological fixes for politics provides essential context for assessing today's exaggerated claims that AI will solve political problems.

Published by MIT Press under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.