ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses evolutionary political economy as a research programme, following two central goals. First, to investigate and understand the endogenous dynamics of capitalist development and second, to use formal computational simulation methods, in particular agent-based modelling, synthesizing this knowledge for communication to a larger audience. Evolutionary economics has focused on the economic spectrum of political economic evolution, concerned with processes of innovation and imitation in production and consumption. This focus orientates itself theoretically around variational evolution and aims to discuss how novelty originates, adopts and retains in the economy. The approach, however, faces certain difficulties in expressing the transformation from one such a historical period to another – qualitatively different – one. Evolutionary political economy aims to fill this gap by complementing it with a second process, concerned with the development of social choices, following transformational evolution. Social choices involve the political spectrum and build up cumulatively through mediated communication processes, as democracies provide them. Some social choices are of historical magnitude because they structurally affect the entirety of social conditions and thereby enable the potential for qualitative change. The latter provides terrain for transformation into a further stage of political economic evolution, breaking with the previous history. On the one hand, a theoretical framework is developed by using complementary themes between Marx, Schumpeter, Veblen and Georgescu-Roegen on transformational evolution, and on the other hand, the generativist approach of agent-based modelling is discussed for the development of simulations of ascribed political economic dynamics.
