It originated in the work of sociologist Jack Goldstone and has recently been developed further by the quantitative historians Peter Turchin, Andrey Korotayev, Leonid Grinin and Sergey Nefedov.
For instance, the theory takes into account the numbers and composition of elites, the age structure and degree of urbanization of the general population, and the revenues and expenditures of the state.
[8] As a graduate student in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Goldstone noted a persistent pattern: in the decades leading up to major historical outbreaks of political instability, such as the string of revolutions in France, the Netherlands, and America in the late 18th century or the Taiping Rebellion in China (1850–1864), the societies in question had experienced substantial population growth, leading to a 'youth bulge' and to rapid urbanization.
This association had been noted by a number of historians, but had not yet been systematically explored in the context of global demography and the history of revolutions and civil war.
The structural-demographic theory emerged from his attempts to apply the insights of political demography to the study of revolutions in world history.