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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 16: Tipping Points in Social and Climate Systems (accompanying session for SYTP)
SOE 16.2: Talk
Thursday, March 12, 2026, 12:00–12:15, GÖR/0226
Stability and decay of socio-political systems — •Vaishnavi Jayakumar1, Matthew Wilson2, and Karoline Wiesner1 — 1Institute for Physics and Astronomy, University of Potsdam, Germany — 2Department of Political Science, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA
The government is a fundamental unit of modern societies. There have been many efforts to quantify different styles of governance, one of the most prominent being the V-Dem project. V-Dem provides a comprehensive set of indicators on governance quality, including the Electoral Democracy Index (EDI). Governing styles can be classified in various ways based on such indicators; this has led to many studies on the feasibility, stability, and resilience of such socio-political institutions. In our present work, we analyze the V-Dem database, spanning across 195 countries, and examine the effective lifetimes and decay dynamics of various governments and regimes. Using survival analysis methods, we model regime longevity in terms of half-life and mortality rates. We find that countries with an EDI > 0.5 approximate a fairly straightforward decay function with a well-defined half-life, whereas countries with an EDI < 0.5 display irregular lifetimes, with a trajectory that evades a simple steady-state description. This heterogeneity can be understood by accounting for the underlying drivers of both regime endurance and collapse. We further investigate how economic and institutional factors shape regime lifetimes and contribute to the observed variability. Our study thus sheds new light on the key ingredients that underpin regime stability and mortality.
Keywords: socio-political; stability; decay; model; mortality