SimPolitics: America’s Quest to Solve Politics with Computers

A history of how computers came to shape political imagination, from election forecasting to AI in the United States, and what that history tells us about democracy today.

For more than six decades, politicians, researchers, consultants, and policy experts have imagined that computers could help solve politics. Drawing on my recent MIT Press book, SimPolitics, this talk traces the history of efforts to model elections, voters, international relations, and political futures through computation. From campaign simulators and forecasting systems to contemporary debates about artificial intelligence and democracy, I examine how political problems came to be understood as computational ones. By recovering the long history of these technological ambitions, the talk offers a critical perspective on current claims that AI can fix democratic governance and invites audiences to rethink the role of computation in shaping political imagination.

Fenwick McKelvey is Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University, Director of Machine Agencies at the Milieux Institute, and former Co-Director of the Applied AI Institute. His research examines AI governance, digital media, democracy, and human-machine relations. 

Image credit: Static. Elice Racine. Used with a Creative Commons License.