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Peter Turchin's Political Stress Index Updated to 2024
by Charadata
Peter Turchin is an academic and author known for quantifying political cycles throughout history. One of his most prominent metrics is the Political Stress Index (PSI), detailed in his 2013 paper “Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability.”1
The paper, published in 2013, showed a steep, accelerating rise in the Political Stress Index for the United States, anticipating intensifying political polarization. However, the original analysis stopped in 2012. Below is a recreated version of Turchin’s PSI, updated through 2024.2
Hopefully the Political Stress Index proves less prescient for the coming decade than it did for the last.
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Peter Turchin, “Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability,” Cliodynamics 4, no. 2 (2013): 241–280, Link. ↩
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Caveat: From 2010 onward, the distrust in government component is the percent of Pew Research Center responders who do not “trust the government to do what is right just about always/most of the time,” with the average of each year’s polls used. Turchin’s original version instead input the “percent responding negatively to the government trust question.” Perhaps previously you could eliminate the indifferent or unsure reponders. Everything else should be true to the original. ↩