Politiska och ekonomiska ”uttrycksarters” uppkomst genom institutionell selektion

Abstract

The origin of political- economic action by means of institutional selection: Some steps toward an evolutionary political economics. This essay takes some initial steps toward an evolutionary political economics by proposing to consider social, political, economic and cultural action subject to (a) variation, (b) (institutional) selection, and (c) ‘inheritence’ in tradition, experience, investments, etc., i.e. the three preconditions for a ‘social action evolution’ of Darwinian type. It draws from a number of conceptual sources, including dynamic and non-linear models in political science, sociology, economics, economic history, research policy, and most notably 'memetics' (i.e. the new discipline created on the basis of Richard Dawkins' theory of 'memes' - culturgenes - in The Selfish Gene 1976 and The Extended Phenotype 1982), however in this text divorced from the socio-biological notion of ‘culture’ as subordinated to biology. A number of propositions are made on the basis of analogies with theoretical biology however, e.g. an analogy between Robert Dahl's theory of paths toward polyarchy (democratization) and Sewall Wright's theory of adaptive landscapes; a solution to the problem of Lamarckian evolution-of-institutions and innovations as suggested by Douglass North and other prominent scholars in evolutionary and institutional economics and technology policy; the question of rapid innovation 'arms races'; and a memetic interpretation of Schumpeterian ‘new combinations’. Since the adoption of this approach equals a paradigm shift also for political science, and we are all'interested in what such a paradigm shift will bring to our discipline, an analogy is made with Nico Tinbergen's ‘Four Evolutionary Questions Why’, i.e. his strategy for developing ethology as a new approach in biology.