Democracy index for selected countries, as measured by the Economist Intelligence Unit for 2006 - 2017. The EIU democracy index takes values between 0 (worst) and 10 (best). Shown are data for Norway (green), United States of America (blue), Hungary (orange), Poland (red) and North Korea (black), the values for 2007 and 2009 are linear interpolations as no indices were reported for these two years.
Dr Karoline Wiesner, University of Bristol
Complex systems theory is usually used to study things like the immune system, global climate, ecosystems, transportation or communications systems. But with global politics becoming more unpredictable - highlighted by the UK's vote for Brexit and the presidential elections of Donald Trump in the USA and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil - it is being used to examine the stability of democracies. An international, interdisciplinary team including mathematicians, economists, psychologists, philosophers, sociologists and political scientists publishes a collective examination of the work in this field today in the European Journal of Physics. Dr Karoline Wiesner , from the University of Bristol's School of Mathematics , is the lead author. She explains the premise of the team's work: "There is little work on the circumstances under which instability of democracy might happen. So, we lack the theory to show us how a democracy destabilises to the point it is not describable as a democracy anymore. "This reflects the way we in the west have lived in the past 50 to 60 years.
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