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

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reliability theory framework to analyze African political stability, revealing how failure rate structures correlate with state fragility and regime stability, supported by empirical data.

Contribution

It presents a novel reliability-based approach to quantify sociopolitical stability and introduces new insights into the relationship between polity failure rates and regime types.

Findings

High failure rates correlate with increased state fragility.

Polity duration exhibits a quasi-U-shape across regime types.

Structural properties of failure rates predict political vulnerabilities.

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 sociopolitical 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 87.50%, 75%, 71.43%, and 0% 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.