This blog’s gotten a lot more traffic than usual since yesterday, when Max Fisher of the Washington Post called out my 2013 coup forecasts in a post on WorldViews.
I’m grateful for the attention Max has drawn to my work, but if it had been up to me, I would have done the mapping a little differently. As I said to Max in an email from which he later excerpted, the forecasts simply aren’t sharp enough to parse the world as finely as their map did. Our theories of what causes coup attempts are too fuzzy and our measures of the things in those theories are too spotty to estimate the probability of these rare events with that much precision.
But, hey, I’m a data guy. I don’t have to stick to grumbling about the Post‘s map; I can make my own! So…
The map below sorts the countries of the world into three groups based on their relative coup risk for 2013: highest (red), moderate (orange), and lowest (beige). I emphasize “relative” because coup attempts are very rare, so the estimated risk of coup attempts in any given country in any single year is pretty small. For example, Guinea-Bissau tops my list for 2013, and the estimated probability of at least one coup attempt occurring there this year is only 25%. Most countries worldwide are under 2%.
Consistent with an emphasis on relative risk, the categories I’ve mapped are based on rank order, not predicted probability. The riskiest fifth of the world (33 countries) makes up the “highest” group, the second fifth the “moderate” group, and the bottom three-fifths the “lowest” group.
This forecasting process doesn’t have enough of track record for me to say exactly how those categories relate to real-world risk, but based on my experience working with similar data and models, I would expect roughly four of every five coup attempts to occur in countries identified here as high risk, and the occasional “miss” to come from the moderate-risk set. Only very rarely should coup attempts come from the 100 or so countries in the low-risk group.
