Dresden 2026 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 12: Statistical Physics of Politics
SOE 12.1: Talk
Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 17:15–17:30, GÖR/0226
Critical Dynamics govern the Evolution of Political Regimes — •Joshua Uhlig1, Paula Pirker-Díaz1, Matthew Wilson2, Ralf Metzler1, and Karoline Wiesner1 — 1University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany — 2University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA
The emergence and decline of democratic systems worldwide raises fundamental questions about the dynamics of political change. Contrary to the idea of a stable end point of liberal democracy, recent backsliding towards less democratic regimes highlights the non-stationary nature of regime evolution [1]. Here, we analyse the historical trajectories of countries within a two-dimensional regime space derived from the principal components of the Varieties of Democracy dataset [2]. We observe weakly non-ergodic dynamics unfolding in an effective landscape characterised by sparse and shifting basins of stability. Step sizes and waiting times follow heavy-tailed distributions near the critical regime, in which mean values appear to diverge, indicating intermittent and heterogeneous regime change. A continuous time random walk model [3] reproduces the dynamics of the three most recent decades with remarkable accuracy. Together, these results suggest that some aspects of political regime evolution follow universal stochastic principles, while remaining punctuated by unique historical pathways.
[1] P Pirker-Díaz et al., R Soc Open Sci. 12, 250457 (2025) [2] K Wiesner et al., R. Soc. Open Sci. 11, 240262 (2024) [3] R Metzler et al., Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 16, 24128 (2014)
Keywords: political regime change; continuous time random walk (CTRW); weak ergodicity breaking; critical dynamics