Computational Macrohistory: Exploratory Empirical Application – The Arab Spring as a Preliminary Test Case for Structural-Demographic Theory

The Arab Spring of 2010 to 2012 removed long-standing governments in Tunisia and Egypt while leaving Saudi Arabia largely unaffected, a differential pattern that explanations centred on social media, youth demographics, or economic grievance have struggled to accommodate. This paper applies the Computational Macrohistory (CMH) framework to those three cases as an exploratory test of its operational machinery. Using data for 2000 to 2012, we construct a five-component Systemic Stress Index (SSI) combining youth bulge (D₂), income inequality (E₂), youth unemployment (E₄), an anocracy transformation of the Polity score (P₁), and internet penetration (S₃), and we assess whether the index separates revolutionary from stable outcomes through comparative case analysis, threshold classification, and counterfactual reasoning. The SSI ranks the cases in order of outcome severity, Tunisia (0.52) above Egypt (0.10) above Saudi Arabia (-0.09), and a threshold of zero classifies all three correctly. Component decomposition identifies regime type as the discriminating variable: Saudi Arabia’s full autocracy contributes -0.42 to its index, while the anocratic regimes of Tunisia and Egypt contribute positively, and counterfactually shifting Saudi Arabia to an anocracy would raise its index by +0.58, into the revolutionary zone. Economic stress is present in all three cases and proves sufficient in none. With N = 3 the analysis is a proof of concept rather than a statistical validation: under random scores a separating threshold would exist with probability 1/3 and the exact ordering observed with probability 1/6, and no inferential claim is made. The results nonetheless show that the framework can be operationalised against real historical data, and they motivated the eleven-country extension carried out in the subsequent paper of this series.