Political Stress Index of Poland
Tomasz Stachowiak, Zbigniew Pasek
TL;DR
This paper applies the Political Stress Index (PSI) to Poland to quantify social unrest and assess its historical relevance. It uses a multiplicative PSI structure $\Psi = MMP \cdot EMP \cdot SFD$, with $MMP = (N_{urb} \cdot A_{20-29}) / w$, $EMP = e / ε$, and $SFD = y \cdot D$, testing both direct data and data-informed dynamics. The results show no imminent unrest in the present but a historical alignment with the late communist collapse, while revealing critical issues in the elite component and parameter sensitivity that undermine generalisability. The authors propose a logistic modification to bound the elite fraction and reinterpret $e$ as a perceived wage discrepancy, arguing for extensions to include axiological factors and media influences to improve cross-country 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.