Revolutions rarely achieve their expressed goals, which often include greater economic prosperity, a more egalitarian distribution of rewards, ending corruption, and a less oppressive state. Yet there is no single reason for this, as revolutions of many types—violent and non-violent, radical and moderate—can produce similar outcomes. We explain this by treating revolutionary outcomes as the result of a decision tree process, in which outcomes are reached by a series of steps in which only the initial state of each step and the events at that junction determine the subsequent step. This simplification allows us to identify numerous pathways by which revolutions can unfold. However, relatively few such trajectories lead to stable constitutional regimes.

革命很少能实现其明确的目标，这些目标通常包括更大的经济繁荣、更平等的奖励分配、结束腐败和减少国家的压迫。然而，这并不是单一的原因，因为多种类型的革命——暴力和非暴力、激进和温和——都可以产生类似的结果。我们通过将革命性结果视为决策树过程的结果来解释这一点，其中结果是通过一系列步骤达到的，其中只有每个步骤的初始状态和该连接点的事件决定后续步骤。这种简化使我们能够确定革命展开的多种途径。然而，这样的轨迹相对较少会导致稳定的宪政政权。