SimPolitics
America’s Quest to Solve Politics with Computers
$182.00
- Paperback
372 pages
- Release Date
28 July 2026
Summary
How computer models became fundamental to political practice—from winning elections to global affairs—and how we imagine political futures as a computing problem.
For more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics, Fenwick McKelvey traces the entwined history of politics and computers from the 1960s to the late 1980s. He shows how programmers, consultants, academics, politic…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780262053198 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0262053195 |
| Author: | Fenwick McKelvey |
| Publisher: | MIT Press Ltd |
| Imprint: | MIT Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 372 |
| Release Date: | 28 July 2026 |
| Weight: | 369g |
| Dimensions: | 152mm x 229mm |
| Series: | Information Policy |
Critics Review
ENDORSEMENTS
“SimPolitics is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how computers have shaped our political imagination—and our democracy. “
—Fred Turner, Stanford University; author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture
“McKelvey artfully demonstrates that the histories of modeling and simulating politics still hold the potential to produce more diverse, more equitable, and more democratic alternatives to what we have now.”
—Orit Halpern, Dresden University of Technology; author of The Smartness Mandate
“With rich detail, Fenwick McKelvey’s brilliant SimPolitics urgently reminds us that we should spend less time worrying about perfecting simulations and more time thinking about their politics.”
—Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; author of Platforms, Power, and Politics
“This incisive analysis of the promise and danger of computerizing human worlds is a must-read for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of simulation and human-machine relations.”
—Joy Rohde, University of Michigan; author of Armed with Expertise
“SimPolitics combines cultural analysis and historical scholarship to trace the rise of computer modeling as a technology that renders political problems computationally tractable. Developed in relation to democratic political participation, McKelvey’s argument has wider relevance for the use of computer modeling and simulation in other sites of algorithmically based prediction. He follows these lines of connection out from domestic to geopolitical domains, looping back in the end to the figurations of agency that inform simulated worlds.”
—Lucy Suchman, Professor Emerita, Lancaster University, UK; author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations
Fenwick McKelvey
Fenwick McKelvey is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Codirector of the Applied AI Institute at Concordia University. He is the author of Internet Daemons and coauthor of The Permanent Campaign.
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