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Modern societies face the challenge that the time scale of opinion formationis continuously accelerating in contrast to the time scale of politicaldecision making. With the latter remaining of the order of the election cyclewe examine here the case that the political state of a society is determined bythe continuously evolving values of the electorate. Given this assumption weshow that the time lags inherent in the election cycle will inevitable lead topolitical instabilities for advanced democracies characterized both by anaccelerating pace of opinion dynamics and by high sensibilities (politicalcorrectness) to deviations from mainstream values. Our result is based on theobservation that dynamical systems become generically unstable whenever timedelays become comparable to the time it takes to adapt to the steady state. Thetime needed to recover from external shocks grows in addition dramaticallyclose to the transition. Our estimates for the order of magnitude of theinvolved time scales indicate that socio-political instabilities may developonce the aggregate time scale for the evolution of the political values of theelectorate falls below 7-15 months.

Entrenched time delays versus accelerating opinion dynamics: are advanced democracies inherently unstable?