Assessing Coup Risk in 2012

Which countries around the world are most likely to see coup activity in 2012?

This question popped back into my mind this morning when I read a new post on Daniel Solomon’s Securing Rights blog about widening schisms in Sudan’s armed forces that could lead to a coup attempt. There’s also been a lot of talk in early 2012 about the likelihood of a coup in Syria, where the financial and social costs of repression, sanctions, and now civil war continue to mount. Meanwhile, Pakistan seems to have dodged a coup bullet early this year after a tense showdown between its elected civilian government and military leaders. I even saw one story–unsubstantiated, but from a reputable source–about a possible foiled coup plot in China around New Year’s Day. These are all countries where a coup d’etat would shake up regional politics, and coups in some of those countries could substantially alter the direction of armed conflicts in which government forces are committing mass atrocities, to name just two of the possible repercussions.

To give a statistical answer to the question of coup risk in 2012, I’ve decided to dust off a couple of coup-forecasting algorithms I developed in early 2011 and gin up some numbers. Both of these algorithms…

1. Take the values of numerous indicators identified by statistical modeling as useful predictors of coup activity (see the end of this post for details);
2. Apply weights derived from that modeling to those indicators; and then
3. Sum and transform the results to spit out a score we can interpret as an estimate of the probability that a coup event will occur some time in 2011.

Both algorithms are products of Bayesian model averaging (BMA) applied to logistic regression models of annual coup activity (any vs. none) in countries worldwide over the past few decades. One of the modeling exercises, done for a private-sector client, looked only at successful coups using data compiled by the Center for Systemic Peace. The other modeling exercise was done for a workshop at the Council on Foreign Relations on forecasting political instability; this one looked at all coup attempts, successful or failed, using data compiled by Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne. For the 2012 coup risk assessments, I’ve simply averaged the output from the two.

The dot plot below shows the estimated coup risk in 2012 for the 40 countries with the highest values (i.e., greatest risk). The horizontal axis is scaled for probabilities ranging from zero to 1; if you’re more comfortable thinking in percentages, just multiply the number by 100. As usual with all statistical forecasts of rare events, the estimates are mostly close to zero. (On average, only a handful of coup attempts occur worldwide each year, and they’ve become even rarer since the end of the Cold War; see this earlier post for details). For a variety of reasons, the estimates are also less precise than those dots might make them seem, so small differences should be taken with a grain of salt. Even so, these results of this exercise should offer plausible estimates of the chances that we’ll see coup activity in these countries some time in 2012.

Here are a few of things that stand out for me in those results.

• My forecast supports Daniel’s analysis that the risk of a coup attempt in Sudan in 2012 is relatively high. It ranks 11th on the global list, making it one of the most likely candidates for coup activity this year.
• Surprising to me, Pakistan barely cracks into the top 40, landing at 38th in the company of Iraq, Cambodia, and Senegal. Those countries all rank higher than 120 others, but the distance between their estimated risk and the risk in most other countries is within the realm of statistical noise. Off the top of my head, I would have identified Pakistan and Iraq as relatively vulnerable countries, and I would not have thought of Cambodia or Senegal as particularly coup-prone cases.
• Unsurprising to me, China doesn’t even make the top 40. Perhaps there has been some erosion in civilian control in recent years, as Gordon Chang discusses, but it still doesn’t much resemble the countries that have seen full-blown coup attempts in the past few decades.
• Interestingly, Syria doesn’t show up in the top 40, either. To make sense of this forecast, it’s important to note that assigning a low probability to the occurrence of a coup attempt in Syria in 2012 isn’t the same thing as a prediction that President Bashar al-Assad or his regime will survive the year. It might seem like semantic hair-splitting, but the definitions of coups used to construct the data on which these forecasts are based do not include cases where national leaders resign under pressure or are toppled by rebel groups. So the Syria forecast suggests only that Assad is unlikely to be overthrown by his own security forces. As it happens, my analysis of countries most likely to see democratic transitions in 2012 put Syria in the top 10 on that list.
• Two of the countries near the top of that list–Guinea and Democratic Republic of Congo–are the ones where the Center for Systemic Peace’s Monty Marshall tells me he saw coup activity meeting his definition in 2011. Those recent coup attempts are influencing the 2012 forecasts, but both countries were also near the top of the 2011 risk list. This boosts my confidence in the reliability of these assessments.

I hope there’s a lot more on (or off) that list that interests readers, and I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on the results in the Comments section. For now, though, I’m going to wrap up this post by providing more information on what those forecasts take into account. The algorithm for successful coups uses just four risk factors, one of which is really just an adjustment to the intercept.

• Infant mortality rate (relative to annual global median, logged): higher risk in countries with higher rates.
• Degree of democracy (Polity score, quadratic): higher risk for countries in the mid-range of the 21-point scale.
• Recent coup activity (yes or no): higher risk if any activity in the past five years.
• Post-Cold War period: lower risk since 1989.

The algorithm for any coup attempts, successful or failed, uses the following ten risk factors, including all four of the ones used to forecast successful coups.

• Infant mortality rate (relative to annual global median, logged): higher risk in countries with higher rates.
• Recent coup activity (count of past five years with any, plus one and logged): higher risk with more activity.
• Post-Cold War period: lower risk since 1989.
• Popular uprisings in region (count of countries with any, plus one and logged): higher risk with more of them.
• Insurgencies in region (count of countries with any, plus one and logged): higher risk with more of them.
• Economic growth (year-to-year change in GDP per capita): higher risk with slower growth.
• Regime durability (time since last abrupt change in Polity score, plus one and logged): lower risk with longer time.
• Ongoing insurgency (yes or no): higher risk if yes.
• Ongoing civil resistance campaign (yes or no): higher risk if yes.
• Signatory to 1st Optional Protocol of the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (yes or no): lower risk if yes.

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on January 30, 2012

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