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Playing the political game: the coevolution of institutions with group size and political inequality

All societies need to form institutional rules to regulate their social interactions. These specify what actions individuals should take in particular situations, and what sanctions will apply if individuals violate these rules. However, forming these institutional rules involves playing a political...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Powers, Simon T., Perret, Cedric, Currie, Thomas E.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10291427/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37381856
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0303
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author Powers, Simon T.
Perret, Cedric
Currie, Thomas E.
author_facet Powers, Simon T.
Perret, Cedric
Currie, Thomas E.
author_sort Powers, Simon T.
collection PubMed
description All societies need to form institutional rules to regulate their social interactions. These specify what actions individuals should take in particular situations, and what sanctions will apply if individuals violate these rules. However, forming these institutional rules involves playing a political game—a process of negotiation between individuals that is costly and time-consuming. Intuitively, this cost should be expected to increase as a group becomes larger, which could then select for a transition to hierarchy to keep the cost of playing the political game down as group size increases. However, previous work has lacked a mechanistic yet general model of political games that could formalize this argument and test the conditions under which it holds. We address this by formalizing the political game using a standard consensus formation model. We show that the increasing cost of forming a consensus over institutional rules selects for a transition from egalitarian to hierarchical organization over a wide range of conditions. Playing a political game to form institutional rules in this way captures and unites a previously disparate set of voluntary theories for hierarchy formation, and can explain why the increasing group size in the Neolithic would lead to strong political inequality. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary ecology of inequality’.
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spelling pubmed-102914272023-06-27 Playing the political game: the coevolution of institutions with group size and political inequality Powers, Simon T. Perret, Cedric Currie, Thomas E. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci Articles All societies need to form institutional rules to regulate their social interactions. These specify what actions individuals should take in particular situations, and what sanctions will apply if individuals violate these rules. However, forming these institutional rules involves playing a political game—a process of negotiation between individuals that is costly and time-consuming. Intuitively, this cost should be expected to increase as a group becomes larger, which could then select for a transition to hierarchy to keep the cost of playing the political game down as group size increases. However, previous work has lacked a mechanistic yet general model of political games that could formalize this argument and test the conditions under which it holds. We address this by formalizing the political game using a standard consensus formation model. We show that the increasing cost of forming a consensus over institutional rules selects for a transition from egalitarian to hierarchical organization over a wide range of conditions. Playing a political game to form institutional rules in this way captures and unites a previously disparate set of voluntary theories for hierarchy formation, and can explain why the increasing group size in the Neolithic would lead to strong political inequality. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary ecology of inequality’. The Royal Society 2023-08-14 2023-06-26 /pmc/articles/PMC10291427/ /pubmed/37381856 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0303 Text en © 2023 The Authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Articles
Powers, Simon T.
Perret, Cedric
Currie, Thomas E.
Playing the political game: the coevolution of institutions with group size and political inequality
title Playing the political game: the coevolution of institutions with group size and political inequality
title_full Playing the political game: the coevolution of institutions with group size and political inequality
title_fullStr Playing the political game: the coevolution of institutions with group size and political inequality
title_full_unstemmed Playing the political game: the coevolution of institutions with group size and political inequality
title_short Playing the political game: the coevolution of institutions with group size and political inequality
title_sort playing the political game: the coevolution of institutions with group size and political inequality
topic Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10291427/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37381856
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0303
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