Chaos and the Theory of Elections

The concept of “chaos” is a fairly recent development, but already it plays an important, integral role in the study of dynamical systems. Using these mathematical techniques, we now understand how and why deterministic systems admit what appears to be highly random behavior (see, e.g., Devaney, 1986). For instance, these new approaches have enriched our understanding of numerical analyses and of physical and biological systems. Recently, as one might expect, chaos has been discovered in dynamical models developed for the social sciences (Saari, 1985a).