The Darwinian evolution of political preferences and the collective strategies they support

Abstract

The success of social groups depends critically on the institutions, rules, and other collective strategies they adopt. Like material technologies, these social technologies may improve through a process analogous to biological evolution: if the preferences of more successful individuals are more likely to spread, groups may gradually adopt more effective strategies. Crucially, this could explain how complex yet efficient rules emerge. Still, it remains unclear whether this process generally generates improvement in collective strategies, and under what conditions. We address this question with a general model in which preferences over strategies are transmitted between individuals, while the strategies groups adopt are determined by those preferences. We show that selection on preferences can indeed improve collective strategies across a wide range of conditions. However, whether improvement occurs, and how quickly, depends strongly on how collective decisions translate individual preferences into group outcomes. We demonstrate that this can lead to dramatic long-run differences in the strategies groups adopt: some populations rapidly converge on efficient strategies, whereas others remain stuck with inefficient ones because improvement is too slow, stalls, or is undermined by drift or maladaptive biases.