In social science, the structural-demographic theory (SDT, also known as Demographic Structural Theory) uses
mathematical
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
modeling to explain and predict outbreaks of
political instability Political decay is a political theory, originally described by Samuel P. Huntington, which describes how chaos and disorder can arise from social modernization increasing more rapidly than political and institutional modernization. Huntington provi ...
in complex societies. It originated in the work of sociologist
Jack Goldstone
Jack A. Goldstone (born September 30, 1953) is an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian, specializing in studies of social movements, revolutions, political demography, and the 'Rise of the West' in world history. He is an a ...
and has recently been developed further by the quantitative historians
Peter Turchin
Peter Valentinovich Turchin (russian: Пётр Валенти́нович Турчи́н; born 1957) is a Russian-American complexity scientist, specializing in an area of study he and his colleagues developed called cliodynamics—mathematical m ...
,
Andrey Korotayev
Andrey Vitalievich Korotayev (russian: link=yes, Андре́й Вита́льевич Корота́ев; born 17 February 1961) is a Russian anthropologist, economic historian, comparative political scientist, demographer and sociologist, ...
,
Leonid Grinin
Leonid Efimovich Grinin (russian: Леони́д Ефи́мович Гри́нин; born in 1958) is a Russian philosopher of history, sociologist, political anthropologist, economist, and futurologist.
Born in Kamyshin (the Volgograd Region), Gr ...
and Sergey Nefedov.
Theory
As applied by Peter Turchin and colleagues, SDT divides historically observed societies into four components: the
state
State may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Literature
* ''State Magazine'', a monthly magazine published by the U.S. Department of State
* ''The State'' (newspaper), a daily newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, United States
* ''Our S ...
,
elite
In political and sociological theory, the elite (french: élite, from la, eligere, to select or to sort out) are a small group of powerful people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power, or skill in a group. D ...
s, the general population, and one processual component designed to measure political instability. These four components are each subdivided into different attributes, which fluctuate dynamically and influence one another through a series of feedback loops. For instance, the theory takes into account the numbers and composition of elites, the age structure and degree of urbanization of the general population, and the revenues and expenditures of the state. It also includes an ideological aspect, tracking the prevalence of ‘prosocial’ norms promoting cooperation as well as ‘radical ideologies’, understood as inherently socially disruptive.
History
As a graduate student in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Goldstone noted a persistent pattern: in the decades leading up to major historical outbreaks of political instability, such as the string of revolutions in France, the Netherlands, and America in the late 18th century or the
Taiping Rebellion
The Taiping Rebellion, also known as the Taiping Civil War or the Taiping Revolution, was a massive rebellion and civil war that was waged in China between the Manchu-led Qing dynasty and the Han, Hakka-led Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. It lasted fr ...
in China (1850–1864), the societies in question had experienced substantial population growth, leading to a '
youth bulge
A population pyramid (age structure diagram) or "age-sex pyramid" is a graphical illustration of the distribution of a population (typically that of a country or region of the world) by age groups and sex; it typically takes the shape of a pyramid ...
' and to rapid urbanization. This association had been noted by a number of historians, but had not yet been systematically explored in the context of global demography and the history of revolutions and civil war. The structural-demographic theory emerged from his attempts to apply the insights of political demography to the study of revolutions in world history.
A major contribution to the SDT has been made by Andrey Korotayev and his colleagues who developed their structural-demographic model of "A Trap at the Escape from the Trap" that demonstrated that the emergence of major sociopolitical upheavals at the escape from the
Malthusian trap
Malthusianism is the idea that population growth is potentially exponential while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population die off. This event, c ...
is not an abnormal, but a regular phenomenon.
[Korotayev, A., Malkov, S., & Grinin, L. (2014)]
A trap at the escape from the trap? Some demographic structural factors of political instability in modernizing social systems. ''History & Mathematics'', 4, 201-267 (link to www.academia.edu)
References
{{Reflist
External links
Post on Structural-Demographic Theory on Peter Turchin's blog
Sociological theories
Historiometry
Social theories
Demographic economic problems