Project: Modelling institutional dynamics in historical commons (MIDI)
The MIDI project adopted an interdisciplinary perspective to contribute empirically-grounded and systematic knowledge of the mechanisms driving the process of institutional change.
This project was concluded in Dec 2021.
Project information
Project manager
Giangiacomo Bravo
Other project members
Mike Farjam and Anders Forsman, Linnaeus University; Amineh Ghorbani, Delft Technological University, the Netherlands; Tine de Moor, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Participating organizations
Linnaeus University; Delft Technological University and Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Financier
Riksbankens Jubileumsfond
Timetable
1 Jan 2018–31 Dec 2021
Subject
Social sciences, Department of Social Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, and Department of Biology and Environmental Science, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences
More about the project
The Modelling institutional dynamics in historical commons (MIDI) project adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to contribute empirically-grounded and systematic knowledge of the mechanisms driving the process of institutional change. Its starting point is an exceptional dataset of European commons-management institutions recently presented by an international team of historians, the leading one being involved in MIDI as well. Commons are natural or man-made resources shared among different users and needing appropriate institutional arrangements to overcome overuse and promote group-beneficial actions.
Our goal is to exploit our interdisciplinary competences
- to recode the dataset on the basis of a systematic institutional analysis framework,
- to fully exploit its potential through the use of data mining and evolutionary analysis techniques, and
- to embed the resulting knowledge in an agent-based model capturing the essential dynamics of institutional change.
More in detail, after the recoding phase we will adopt techniques developed to study gene se-quences to uncover the relations between the different systems of rules and their development over time. Then we will embed these dynamics into an agent-based model, which will allow historians and social scientists to perform virtual experiments to test alternative hypotheses about the factors that led to the development of specific institutional arrangements and to create plausible scenarios of their future development.
The project is part of the research in the Computational Social Sciences research group and in the Linnaeus University Centre of Excellence (LNUC) for Data Intensive Sciences and Applications.