Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University

This paper outlines the strengths and weaknesses of an evolutionary approach to political psychology. Given the demands on cooperation and social coordination in human evolutionary history, it is likely that numerous psychological traits are adaptations to, rather than mere predecessors of, human political behavior and that these evolved traits continue to shape modern political cognition. Differentiating between adapted and learned traits, however, remains a difficult prospect.

The MIT Political Science Department and The Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University are sponsoring a seminar on formal and quantitative political research. The Program on Positive Political Economy (PPE) supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying "economic" behavior in the political process or "political" behavior in the marketplace.

Models of elections tend to predict that parties will maximize votes by converging to an electoral center. There is no empirical support for this prediction. In order to account for the phenomenon of political diver- gence, this paper offers a stochastic electoral model where party leaders or candidates are differentiated by differing valences-the electoral perception of the quality of the party leader.