Shared Cultural History as a Predictor of Political and Economic Changes among Nation States.

ABSTRACT: Political and economic risks arise from social phenomena that spread within and across countries. Regime changes, protest movements, and stock market and default shocks can have ramifications across the globe. Quantitative models have made great strides at predicting these events in recent decades but incorporate few explicitly measured cultural variables. However, in recent years cultural evolutionary theory has emerged as a major paradigm to understand the inheritance and diffusion of human cultural variation. Here, we combine these two strands of research by proposing that measures of socio-linguistic affiliation derived from language phylogenies track variation in cultural norms that influence how political and economic changes diffuse across the globe. First, we show that changes over

SUBMITTER: Matthews LJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4844133 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature