Structural-Demographic Theory

Summary

The causes of revolutions and major rebellions are in many ways similar to processes that cause earthquakes (Goldstone 1991: 35). In both revolutions and earthquakes it is useful to distinguish the structural conditions (pressures, which build up slowly) from triggers (sudden releasing events, which immediately precede a social or geological eruption). Specific triggers of political upheavals, such as self-immolation of a fruit vendor, which triggered the Arabic Spring in Tunisia, are very hard, perhaps impossible to predict. On the other hand, structural pressures build up slowly and predictably, and are amenable to analysis and forecasting. Furthermore, many triggering events themselves are ultimately caused by pent-up social pressures that seek an outlet—in other words, by the structural factors. Structural-demographic theory was developed by Goldstone and others (Nefedov 2003, Turchin 2003, Korotayev et al. 2011) as a tool for understanding long-term social pressures that lead to revolutions, civil wars, and other major outbreaks of socio-political instability. The theory represents complex human societies as systems with three main compartments (the general population, the elites, and the state) interacting with each other and with socio-political instability via a web of nonlinear feedbacks (Figure 1). The focus on only these four structural components is not quite as great oversimplification as it may appear, because each component has a number of attributes that change dynamically in response to changes in other structural-demographic variables. Figure 1. The main logical components of the structural-demographic theory. Dynamics of population numbers (italics indicate various attributes listed in Figure 1), for example, are affected by other attributes of the general population, such as incomes and consumption levels. Higher consumption levels and some other factors, such as social optimism, have a positive effect on population growth (when they are high, pe...