User:ShannonLee/Politics & math
On your profile page within the wiki, write an essay describing a particular use of calculus in your field of study, or in a field of interest to you. Feel free of course to add pictures, links and/or videos on the page (that's the advantage of writing online versus on paper). Your essay should be at least 500 words long (think a nice and interesting full page of text).
The use of calculus at first does not seem relevant to Political Science. However, as one evaluates the relationship between these two subject areas more closely it becomes clear that even in the realm of politics, math plays a huge part. The study of statistics is a huge component of political science. Evaluating numbers, percentages and averages are necessary to help understand what the population wants/needs as well as for developing political platforms.
In the statistical politics class I am currently taking, learning how to critically engage numbers as a representative of popular opinion is crucial. Many important decisions are decided upon based on polls and surveys. Politicians decide upon their platform, and strategy as a direct result of the outcome of particular census data. Calculus plays a huge part in increasing one’s knowledge on how to manipulate models or formulas as well as how to interpret said models. Ultimately, statistics interprets people’s political ideas or opinions and applies them to polls. Through using numbers as representatives of opinions political scientist are able to track changing opinions and preferences. Statistics are extremely useful because they summarize vast amounts of information into a succinct fashion, represented by numbers and graphs. As a direct result of using numbers to represent data, political experts are moving closer and closer to being able to predict future wars or voter tendencies.
A key component to politics is number crunching. Budgets, population, cost/benefit analysis’ are all things in politics that incorporate the basic skills of calculus. The key component to almost any political movement, party, candidate etc. is budget. Calculus allows the experts to crunch numbers in order to find out things such as “will spending x amount on y bring more revenue or benefit, than spending x amount on z.” Many questions regarding budgetary concerns can be answered through creating particular models to evaluate potential expenditures and cost-benefits. Economics uses many mathematical devices, in turn, political science is heavily influenced and heavily influences economics; therefore, political science also employs the same economic mathematical devices.
Predicting population growth in certain regions as well as economic tendencies, environmental patterns, or trends in voting are all key concerns of political science. Through evaluating and applying previous patterns through the use of graphs, data and modeling, the probable outcome of a situation can be achieved. Despite the fact that it is very difficult, and some say impossible, to quantify beliefs, ideas and opinions, as math becomes increasing integrated into this field, political science tentatively crosses the border from social sciences to a “hard” sciences. Political scientists in the United States have been able to predict federal election outcomes in recent years by analyzing the country’s GDP and unemployment rates. Through using mathematical devices and statistics these outcomes could be obtained.