Political violence and evolutionary game theory: a methodological introduction

Classical game theory is one of the basic methods of scientific analysis of political phenomena. The models developed on this basis are used in the studies of electoral and legislative behaviour, in the analysis of processes of forming political coalitions, and in the analysis of issues related to democratization, national security and armed conflicts. Evolutionary game theory has developed from classical game theory. This theory is referred to in this article, which presents selected possibilities of using single-population evolutionary models in studies of political violence transmission. On the basis of the analysis of two population variants, the article describes the changes in the prevalence of selected behavioural traits and answers the questions regarding the asymptotic states of evolutionary processes and their stability. The study uses Hawk–Dove and Hawk–Dove–Retaliator type games. The calculations were carried out using the R program.