ABSTRACT
How can new political actors emerge from an aggregation of smaller political actors? This chapter presents a simulation model that provides one answer. In its broadest perspective, the work can be seen as part of the study of emergent organization through “bottom-up” processes. In such “bottom-up” processes, small units interact according to locally defined rules, and the result is emergent properties of the system such as the formation of new levels of organization. Thus the work is typical of the “Santa Fe” approach to complex adaptive systems (Stein 1989; Fontana 1991; Holland 1992). The concern with increased levels of organization is also reminiscent of how biological systems succeeded in making the transition from single-celled organisms to multiplecelled organisms (Buss 1987), and how brains function by organizing individual neurons into meaningful structures (Hebb 1949; Minsky 1985).
