About this episode

Dr. Fenwick McKelvey discusses his book on the historical intersection of politics and computers, exploring the promises and failures of technological solutions in political contexts.

This book is available open access. For more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics: America’s Quest to Solve Politics with Computers (MIT Press, 2026), Dr. Fenwick McKelvey traces the entwined history of politics and computers from the 1960s to the late 1980s. He shows how programmers, consultants, academics, political scientists, and peace activists all worked—sometimes in tandem, sometimes not—to build simulations to win campaigns, predict coups, forecast the future, and render politics as legible as a spreadsheet. Drawing on novel archival and historical research, Dr. McKelvey recounts the history of efforts to simulate politics by building models of elections, voters, and international relations. Comparing attempts in the United States to simulate domestic electoral politics and international affairs, he reveals the unexamined connections and conflicts between the two projects. His book provides a helpful guide to taking stock of exaggerated claims that AI and technology will fix politics, while presenting the long history of such promised technological fixes. This…

People in this episode

Host: Miranda Melcher

Guest: Fenwick McKelvey

Topics covered

• politics
• computers
• simulations
• history
• AI
• technology

Keywords

• political simulations
• AI in politics
• history of computing
• elections
• international relations

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: MIT Press

Books & works: SimPolitics: America’s Quest to Solve Politics with Computers

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