Wargaming for Political Science

• In Event: Wargaming and Behavioral Research in IR

Abstract

What role can war games play in understanding the puzzles of political science? Wargaming is experiencing a policy and scholarly revitalization. This generates not only novel sources of data for understanding institutional pathologies and decision-making, but also offers an alternative to lab or survey experiments for questions with behavioral hypotheses or limited empirical precedent. However, with the promise of wargaming are also a series of limitations. This paper examines both the design of war games and the use of data from war games, and assesses the utility of wargaming as a data generation device within political science. It explores what questions are best examined using wargaming, surveys how data from historical and contemporary war games have been used to understand political decision-making, and assesses similarities and differences between war gaming and other behavioral methodologies. We focus on the use of war games to answer questions in the security studies discipline, but future work may apply the methodology to research in international relations and political science more broadly.

Authors

• Jacquelyn Schneider, Stanford University

• Reid Pauly, Brown University

• Erik Lin-Greenberg, Massachusetts Institute of Technology