How Valuable are the Indicators?

By Jack Goldstone

Jack A. Goldstone (PhD, Harvard University) is the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Professor of Public Policy at HKUST, and a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C.  and a Senior Fellow at the Mercatus Center.  He has won major prizes from the American Sociological Association, the International Studies Association and the Historical Society for his research on revolutions and social change, and has won grants from the MacArthur, JS Guggenheim Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the National Science Foundation.  Goldstone has authored or edited thirteen books and published over one hundred and fifty articles in books and scholarly journals.  His latest books include Why Europe? The Rise of the West 1500-1850, Political Demography: How Population Changes are Reshaping International Security and Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction.

A few years ago, my colleagues and I published an article on forecasting instability in nations around the world.  Two things stood out in that paper.  First, the main determinant of instability was the type of regime.  States with partial democracies, especially ones that exhibited marked factionalism among political groups, were the most likely to experience civil war or descent into authoritarianism.  By contrast, both full democracies and fully autocratic regimes tended to be rather stable. 

 Second, surprisingly few other factors mattered.  We identified infant mortality (which proxies both income and state effectiveness); state discrimination against particular groups; and spill-overs from severe regional instability as the only factors that determined instability across the board.

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