The causal factors of revolution and civil war are straightforward to propose. The interesting part is the quantitative analysis; the validation of the causal model.
On a fun note, I was reading the Wikipedia article on cliodynamics (the discipline whose name the author coined) and saw that the article drew an apt comparison between cliodynamics and Asimov's psychohistory.
The author goes into more detail in Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6qp8x28p)
On a fun note, I was reading the Wikipedia article on cliodynamics (the discipline whose name the author coined) and saw that the article drew an apt comparison between cliodynamics and Asimov's psychohistory.