Między indywidualizmem a holizmem. Wyborcy racjonalni Anthony’ego Downsa w systemach sieciowych

Abstrakt

This article proposes an extension of Anthony Downs’s rational choice model of voting that moves beyond the limitations imposed by both methodological individualism and methodological holism. I adopt an approach grounded in the methodological assumptions of Mario Bunge’s systemism, which integrates within a single analytical framework the characteristics and motivations of individuals with the influence of social structure. I concretize Downs’s model by incorporating social influence, thereby allowing the expected utility of voting to depend on the agent’s local neighborhood within a social network. The concretized model is then used in an agent-based simulation employing networks generated with the Watts–Strogatz algorithm. The results show that, under the same decision rule, different network structures can lead to different levels of declared turnout. The article is primarily methodological in character: it demonstrates how the classical rational choice model of voting can be integrated with a network-based approach and agent-based modeling, preserving the transparency of the decision rule while accounting for the emergent effects of interactions between agents.