Abstract
This article revisits the prediction, made in 2010, that the 2010–2020 decade would likely be a period of growing instability in the United States and Western Europe Turchin P. 2018. This prediction was based on a computational model that quantified in the USA such structural-demographic forces for instability as popular immiseration, intraelite competition, and state weakness prior to 2010. Using these trends as inputs, the model calculated and projected forward in time the Political Stress Indicator, which in the past was strongly correlated with socio-political instability. Ortmans et al. Turchin P. 2010 conducted a similar structural-demographic study for the United Kingdom. Here we use the Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive for the US, UK, and several major Western European countries to assess these structural-demographic predictions. We find that such measures of socio-political instability as anti-government demonstrations and riots increased dramatically during the 2010–2020 decade in all of these countries.
Highlights
How resilient are our societies to internal and external shocks? Can we model and forecast the dynamics of social resilience and its opposite, social breakdown? A major research challenge in answering this question is that growing socio-political instability results from multiple interacting factors: economic, political, and cultural
In this article we provide an assessment for a Structural-demographic theory (SDT) forecast made ten years ago about the United States and Western Europe [2]
2010 structural-demographic forecast for the 2010–2020 decade. Both anti-government demonstrations and riots exhibit similar temporal dynamics: a spike during the late 1960s followed by a low-instability regime until 2010, and another spike after 2010 (Fig 4)
Summary
A major research challenge in answering this question is that growing socio-political instability results from multiple interacting factors: economic, political, and cultural. Previous work on this important issue has been conducted largely by political theorists, policy analysts, sociologists, historians, and computational modelers who worked in isolation from each other with focused, domain-specific data sources [for a recent review, see 1]. They all offer intriguing insights and have produced important discoveries, but each can provide only one piece of the puzzle. SDT can be, and has been formulated as an explicit computational model capable of forecasting future quantitative dynamics of social unrest and political violence in specific social systems.
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