  Modern societies face the challenge that the time scale of opinion formation
is continuously accelerating in contrast to the time scale of political
decision making. With the latter remaining of the order of the election cycle
we examine here the case that the political state of a society is determined by
the continuously evolving values of the electorate. Given this assumption we
show that the time lags inherent in the election cycle will inevitable lead to
political instabilities for advanced democracies characterized both by an
accelerating pace of opinion dynamics and by high sensibilities (political
correctness) to deviations from mainstream values. Our result is based on the
observation that dynamical systems become generically unstable whenever time
delays become comparable to the time it takes to adapt to the steady state. The
time needed to recover from external shocks grows in addition dramatically
close to the transition. Our estimates for the order of magnitude of the
involved time scales indicate that socio-political instabilities may develop
once the aggregate time scale for the evolution of the political values of the
electorate falls below 7-15 months.
