Fuzzy cognitive map theory for the political domain

An acceleration of regional and international events contributes to the increasing challenges in political decision making, especially the decision to strengthen bilateral economic relationships between friendly nations. Obviously this becomes one of the critical decisions. Typically, such decisions are influenced by certain factors and variables that are based on heterogeneous and vague information. A serious problem that the decision maker faces is the difficulty in building efficient political decision support systems (DSS) with heterogeneous factors. The basic concept is a linguistic variable whose values are words rather than numbers and therefore closer to human intuition. Fuzzy logic is based on natural language and is tolerant of imprecise data. Furthermore, fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) is particularly applicable in the soft knowledge domains such as political science. In this paper, a FCM scheme is proposed to demonstrate the causal inter-relationship between certain factors in order to provide insight into better understanding about the interdependencies of these factors. It presents fuzzy causal algebra for governing causal propagation on FCMs.