Political Stress Index of Poland

TL;DR

This paper applies the political stress index to Poland, analyzing unrest levels historically and currently, and discusses model limitations and modifications for better predictive power.

Contribution

It adapts and tests the political stress index on Poland, revealing model sensitivities and proposing modifications for improved long-term analysis.

Findings

No significant unrest in the present day according to the index.

Historical data aligns with the fall of communism in Poland.

Model modifications improve long-term applicability.

Abstract

We apply the political stress index as introduced by Goldstone (1991) and implemented by Turchin (2013), to the case study of Poland. The approach quantifies political and social unrest as a single quantity based on a multitude of economic and demographic variables. The present-day data allow us to directly apply index without the need of simulating the elite component, as was done previously. Neither model version shows appreciable unrest levels for the present, while the simulated model applied to partial historical data yields the index in remarkable agreement with the fall of communism in Poland. We next analyze the model's sensitive dependence on its parameters (the hallmark of chaos), which limits its utility and application to other countries. The original equations cannot, by construction, describe the elite fraction for longer time-periods; and we propose a modification to remedy this problem. The model still holds some predictive power, but we argue that some components should be reinterpreted if one wants to keep its dynamical equations.