forecasts

Coup attempts, even if they fail, as the events in Turkey since July 2016 have shown, can have a major impact on a country. And, as some of the reactions to the Turkey coup attempt have reiterated, they often seem to come as a surprise. We have created coup forecasts for 161 countries for 2017 that should make it more obvious and less surprising where any coup attempts that might happen this year will occur. Aside to presenting those forecasts, this post goes into a little bit more technical detail on how they were created.

First, this project is very much inspired by and in may ways a continuation of Jay Ulfelder’s coup forecasts for 2012-2015 (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015). It also draws on previous work Mike Ward, Cassy Dorff, and I have done on forecasting irregular leadership changes, which include coups, but also other mechanisms of sudden leader change.

Thailand’s Army chief General Prayuth announces the coup on television on 22 May 2014. Source: SCMP

This morning (May 22nd, 2014, East Coast time), the Thai military staged a coup against the caretaker government that had been in power for the past several weeks, after months of protests and political turmoil directed at the government of Yingluck Shinawatra, who herself had been ordered to resign on 7 May by the judiciary. This follows a military coup in 2006, and more than a dozen successful or attempted coups before then.

We predicted this event last month, in a report commissioned by the CIA-funded Political Instability Task Force (which we can’t quite share yet). In the report, we forecast irregular regime changes, which include coups but also successful protest campaigns and armed rebellions, for 168 countries around the world for the 6-month period from April to September 2014. Thailand was number 4 on our list, shown below alongside our top 20 forecasts. It was number 10 on Jay Ulfelder’s 2014 coup forecasts. So much for our inability to forecast (very rare) political events, and the irrelevance of what we do.

—Predictive Heuristics

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Tag Archives: forecasts

Taking stock of the risk of coups d’etat in 2017

Forecasts

The coup in Thailand and progress in forecasting