This webpage contains materials relating to Anticipating Instability by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith.
Within this webpage we provide additional appendices of robustness results, as discussed in the main text.
We also provide a replication of all the main results in the text using Polity’s democracy-autocracy measure as an alternative to our measure of W. We have limited out comments about the Polity version of the analyses to highlighting the few substantively relevant difference, which are mainly a consequence of lower variance in the Polity measure as compared to our measure of W constructed using V-Dem data.
Replication Data
We use numerous data sources. The primary measures of institutions and policy provisions are drawn from the V-Dem project. We use version 14. However, the attached code should readily be adapted to other versions of the data. We also use WDI data from the World Bank. The Banks CNTS data codes for the occurrence of revolution. Our main source coups is Powell and Thyne’s (2011) data, updates of which are available at http://www.uky.edu/~clthyn2/research.htm. Our data on leaders and their heath is from https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/U1MYGI. Data on turnover of cabinet ministers is from Who Governs (Nyrup and Bramwell 2020) https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YTRCQE. Data on military purges are from Sudduth (2021). Press freedom data is from Freedom House.
We provide code to replicate all of our analyses. All our analyses use Stata 17. There are two main data sets. NationYearInstability_ReplicationAugust2024.dta contains the nation-year level of observations. Instability_LeaderYearDataAugust2024.dta contains leader-year data. In order to run the code you might need to install several ado files that are readily available on the internet. You will also need to alter the paths at the top of the code.
These data were compiled using the following code: OrganizeNationYearDataInstabilityProject_April2024.do. The nation year analyses use InstabilityNationYearAnalyses_ReplicationAugust2024.do. This file calls an additional file entitled labels.do, which contains a list of variable labels that are used to create tables. The nation-year level of analyses creates a file of predicted values (InstabilityData_w_PredictedValues_Replication.dta). The leader-year analysis requires this file so the nation-year replication needs to be run before the leader-year analysis. The stata code LeaderSurvival_Analyses_ReplicationAugust2024.do enacts the leader-year survival analyses. You will need to modify the paths at the top of the each file and create two subdirectories (sim1 and tablefigures) in the folder where the data and code are located.
Theoretical Figures
The figures used to illustrate the theoretical concepts in chapter 2 and appendix A2 were created in mathematica: BasicSelectorateFormulationCh2.
The figures in chapter 3 were likewise created with a series of mathematica files: LifeCycleNoRevThreatINDEX and SimulateNPV_w_revolution_Jan2023. These files calculation the Net Present Values and policy choices. A selection of simulations are in the attached files. The mathematica file GraphSolutionToLifeCycleGameINDEX.nb will create the graphs using the data within these simulation files.