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AbstractThis 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.
In 2010 one of us (PT) used the SDT to make the following forecast: “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe” [2]. This forecast was not simply a projection of the current trend in social instability into the future. As we shall see below (Results), social instability in major Western countries had been, in fact, declining prior to 2010. Rather, the basis for this forecast was a quantitative model that took as inputs the major SD drivers for instability (immiseration, intraelite competition, and state (in)capacity) and translated them into the Political Stress Indicator (PSI), which is strongly correlated with socio-political instability [3, 9]. The rising curve of the calculated PSI, then, suggests a growing future socio-political instability.SDT is a general theory that guides our understanding of political violence dynamics and social breakdown in all large-scale state-level societies. However, there are sufficient institutional and other differences between different states. Thus, when we aim to analyse and, possibly, forecast instability dynamics in any particular state, we need to translate the general theory into a specific computational model tailored to the focal state. Over the past four decades this has been accomplished for a large, and growing, number of historical case-studies, ranging from Ancient empires to Early Modern states and nineteenth century’s revolutions and civil wars [3, 5–8, 10–14]. In addition to such historical tests, the theory has been applied to two contemporary societies. The first one is a structural-demographic model for the contemporary USA, which provided the basis for the 2010 prediction. The details of the USA structural-demographic model were published in Turchin [9] and later expanded into a book-length treatment [10]. The second study examined structural-demographic pressures for instability in the contemporary UK [15]. Both studies forecast growing social and political instability in the US and UK into the 2020s. In the next section (Methods) we first describe the SD model for forecasting social pressures for instability and next proceed to examining the empirically observed trends in socio-political instability so that we can assess how these predictions fared.