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The nonlinear dynamical process of self-organized criticality provides a new 'theory of history' that explains a number of unresolved anomalies: Why are the really big events in human history usually unpredictable? Why is it impossible to anticipate sudden political, economic, and social changes? Why do distributions of historical data almost always contain a few extreme events that seem to have had a different cause from all the rest? Why do so many of our 'lessons of history' fail to predict important future events? As people, organizations, and nations become increasingly sensitive to each other's behavior, trivial occurrences sometimes propagate into sudden changes. Such events are unpredictable because in the self-organized criticality environment that characterizes human history, the magnitude of a cause often is unrelated to the magnitude of its effect.

The oldest answered question in the social sciences is 'Why do societies collapse?'. I advance a theory of the collapse of societies that is based on self-organized criticality, which is a nonlinear process that produces sudden shifts and fractal patterns in historical time series. More generally, I conjecture that weak, self-organized criticality is ubiquitous in human systems. If this conjecture is correct, it would not only explain the source of total societal collapses but the pattern of most other sorts of human calamities and even the frequency distribution of many mundane day-to-day events.

Adopting a particular non-linear perspective resolves numerous paradoxes about collective political behaviour. Self-organized criticality occurs if the sensitivity of individuals or groups to each other's actions increases with the passage of time, and, therefore, sudden changes may occur as cascades. In this way scandals, betrayals, miscalculations and other seemingly insignificant actions can sometimes cause cabinet dissolutions, strikes, riots, electoral landslides, wars and a multitude of other phenomena that, until now, have seemed to have had nothing in common.

Adopting a particular non-linear perspective resolves numerous paradoxes about collective political behaviour. Self-organized criticality occurs if the sensitivity of individuals or groups to each other's actions increases with the missage of time, and, therefore, sudden changes may occur as cascades. In this way scandals, betrayals, miscalculations and other seemingly insignificant actions can sometimes cause cabinet dissolutions, strikes, riots, electoral landslides, wars and a multitude of other phenomena that, until now, have seemed to have had nothing in common. (British Journal of Political Science / FUB)

Based on a survey conducted in 1986. Attitudes toward moral protection, moral crusade, pacifism, nuclear pacifism, just war, supreme emergency, retaliatory ethic, legalism, and reason of state.

Little is known about the senators who change their voting positions during normal political times, but it is generally assumed that incumbents have very stable voting records and that vote changes come primarily from the replacement of personnel. This article examines how turnover is related to Senate voting shifts on a variety of issues. The majority of vote changes come from incumbents rather than freshmen. Further, there is no overall difference in the proportion of vote changes made by party turnovers and intraparty replacements.

Rational voting models generally predict that only a few people should vote in most decisions. A major reason why turnout is so high at present is that people are given numerous positive messages about the value of their vote. In a US politics class at the U of Iowa, in which almost all students were freshmen or sophomores, a graduate assistant presented a rational voting model to the 49 students attending his discussion sections, while 106 students in other sections were not exposed to this model. One month later, students completed a questionnaire dealing with various aspects of voting. Those who had taken part in the discussion of rational voting models had significantly lower levels of intention to vote, & clearly different attitudes toward voting. Voting behavior for a hypothetical judicial recall election was also examined; while both sense of duty & personal interest in outcome affected hypothetical voting choices for the control group, neither one independently affected them for the group exposed to the rational voting model; only the two together led to voting. 4 Tables. Modified HA.