It occurred to me a functional approximation of our democracy could be something like electorate is a function of the number of people who vote (and that is a function of what the public believes), electoral_college is a function of electorate, and president is a function of electoral_college PRES(E_C(E(PUB(b))) . It's probably lame because i'm not a mathematician, but the more general question - mathematics can describe so much of nature can it describe government?

If so, might we discover new maxima in the equations, or are people so irrational their government must also be psycho?

You can describe a voting system quite well with maths...

But you cannot describe the effect of some news-articles, or political advertisements... so such a tool would not be able to predict anything.

 

One little action by 1 person can trigger an enormous cascade of effects which can change an entire region (like the guy in Tunesia who set himself on fire - and now revolutions break out in multiple countries).

O I dunno Captain - the cascade of events after the tragic act of Mohamed Bouazizi sound much like those of the 'the butterfly that causes the hurricane' much-beloved of chaos theorists. That we mortal humans could not hope to ever come up with such a system to describe such seemingly infinite complexity does not rule out the possibility that such a system could exist

I wasn't really thinking about predictive models. I was thinking about the Lorenz butterfly yesterday and it got me wondering if strange attractors ever showed up in models of governments or politics. Maybe there is a topography of strange attractors that make up a political landscape?

O I dunno Captain - the cascade of events after the tragic act of Mohamed Bouazizi sound much like those of the 'the butterfly that causes the hurricane' much-beloved of chaos theorists. That we mortal humans could not hope to ever come up with such a system to describe such seemingly infinite complexity does not rule out the possibility that such a system could exist

The system most definitely exists... and I completely agree with your analogy of the butterfly effect.

Although the meteorologists study very hard, they most certainly fail to take every butterfly into the equations.

 

And that's what I tried to say: yes, it's mathematical. No, we can't model it.

 

I wasn't really thinking about predictive models. I was thinking about the Lorenz butterfly yesterday and it got me wondering if strange attractors ever showed up in models of governments or politics. Maybe there is a topography of strange attractors that make up a political landscape?

You can't map the butterflies. They fly whenever they feel like it.