Cliophysics: Socio-Political Reliability Theory, Polity Duration and African Political (In)stabilities

Alhaji Cherif,Kamal Barley,Enrico Scalas

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0015169

Abstract

Quantification of historical sociological processes have recently gained attention among theoreticians in the effort of providing a solid theoretical understanding of the behaviors and regularities present in socio-political dynamics. Here we present a reliability theory of polity processes with emphases on individual political dynamics of African countries. We found that the structural properties of polity failure rates successfully capture the risk of political vulnerability and instabilities in which , , , and of the countries with monotonically increasing, unimodal, U-shaped and monotonically decreasing polity failure rates, respectively, have high level of state fragility indices. The quasi-U-shape relationship between average polity duration and regime types corroborates historical precedents and explains the stability of the autocracies and democracies.

Highlights

Beginning with the Berlin Conference in 1884 – leading to the colonial despotism, to the National Conference of 1989 in Benin – marking the beginning of the democratic renewal, Africa continues to experience various patterns of political-economic regulations, mostly shifting away from autocratic regimes and toward more open governance
We develop a simple model of polity duration that explains historical data, and shows that the risk of polity change depends on the structural properties of polity failure rates
We provide quantitative evidence linking the structural properties of polity failure rates to variations of political dynamics, finding substantial supports and correlations between state fragility indices and the functional shape of polity failure rates

Summary

Introduction

Beginning with the Berlin Conference in 1884 – leading to the colonial despotism, to the National Conference of 1989 in Benin – marking the beginning of the democratic renewal, Africa continues to experience various patterns of political-economic regulations, mostly shifting away from autocratic regimes and toward more open governance. We develop a simple model of polity duration that explains historical data, and shows that the risk of polity change depends on the structural properties of polity failure rates. 1. To study the mechanisms that explain this, we look at the cliometric space diagram of the shape parameters characterizing these polity failure rates to show that the structural properties of the polity failure rates capture the risks of political instabilities.

Results

Conclusion