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Record W2019600686 · doi:10.1177/0022343312442078

Dynamics of political instability in the United States, 1780–2010

2012· article· en· W2019600686 on OpenAlex
Peter Turchin

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Peace Research · 2012
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicTerrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersEconomic and Social Research Council
KeywordsPoliticsInstabilityEliteQuarter (Canadian coin)TerrorismPolitical instabilityHistoryDynamics (music)Political economyPolitical scienceSociologyPhysicsLawMechanicsArchaeology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This article describes and analyses a database on the dynamics of sociopolitical instability in the United States between 1780 and 2010. The database was constructed by digitizing data collected by previous researchers, supplemented by systematic searches of electronic media archives. It includes 1,590 political violence events such as riots, lynchings, and terrorism. Incidence of political violence fluctuated dramatically over the 230 years covered by the database, following a complex dynamical pattern. Spectral analysis detected two main oscillatory modes. The first is a very long-term – secular – cycle, taking the form of an instability wave during the second half of the 19th century, bracketed by two peaceful periods (the first quarter of the 19th century and the middle decades of the 20th century, respectively). The second is a 50-year oscillation superimposed on the secular cycle, with peaks around 1870, 1920, and 1970. The pattern of two periodicities superimposed on each other is characteristic of the dynamics of political instability in many historical societies, such as ancient Rome and medieval and early-modern England, France, and Russia. A possible explanation of this pattern, discussed in the article, is offered by the structural-demographic theory, which postulates that labor oversupply leads to falling living standards and elite overproduction, and those, in turn, cause a wave of prolonged and intense sociopolitical instability.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.015
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.342
Threshold uncertainty score0.994

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0150.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.120
GPT teacher head0.453
Teacher spread0.333 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it