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.
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.