Entropy and institutional theory

Institutional Theory: Problems and Prospects

Institutional theory in political science has made great advances in recent years, but also has a number of significant theoretical and methodological problems. The most important of these problems is the generally static nature of institutional explanations. Also, there is a nagging problem of the difficulties in measuring institutional variables in other than simplistic, nominal categories. A...

Entropy and Ergodic Theory

Modern information theory was born in Shannon’s 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” [Sha48]. The mathematical expression for entropy is older, originating in statistical physics. But it was Shannon’s work that instigated the study of its purely mathematical properties, and uncovered the importance of the type-multiplicity and related problems. For simplicity, let us consider an ...

CHAPTER 2 Institutional Theory

Although most political sociologists and political scientists nowadays either consider themselves or are deemed “institutionalists,” key differences remain among major schools of institutionalism (see reviews in Pierson and Skocpol 2002; Amenta 2005). In this chapter, we review sociological institutionalism, historical institutionalism, and political institutionalism. We discuss their similarit...

Institutional Theory Edit 4

Maximum Entropy and Learning Theory

We derive the learning theory recently reported by Tishby, Levin, and Solla (TLS) without statistical mechanics. We show that the theory generally applies to any problem of modeling data. We analyze an elementary example for which we find the predictions consistent with intuition and conventional statistical results. We numerically examine the more realistic problem of training a competitive ne...