IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0015169.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • Alhaji Cherif
  • Kamal Barley

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Alhaji Cherif & Kamal Barley, 2010. "Cliophysics: Socio-Political Reliability Theory, Polity Duration and African Political (In)stabilities," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 5(12), pages 1-6, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0015169
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0015169
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0015169
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0015169&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0015169?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gurr, Ted Robert, 1974. "Persistence and Change in Political Systems, 1800–1971," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 68(4), pages 1482-1504, December.
    2. Collier, Paul & Hoeffler, Anke, 1998. "On Economic Causes of Civil War," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 50(4), pages 563-573, October.
    3. Ward, Michael D. & Gleditsch, Kristian S., 1998. "Democratizing for Peace," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 92(1), pages 51-61, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Sara McLaughlin & Scott Gates & HÃ¥vard Hegre & Ranveig Gissinger & Nils Petter Gleditsch, 1998. "Timing the Changes in Political Structures," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 42(2), pages 231-242, April.
    2. Robert MacCulloch & Silvia Pezzini, 2010. "The Roles of Freedom, Growth, and Religion in the Taste for Revolution," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 53(2), pages 329-358, May.
    3. Ola Olsson, 2005. "Geography and institutions: Plausible and implausible linkages," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 10(1), pages 167-194, December.
    4. Ravallion, Martin, 2019. "Global inequality when unequal countries create unequal people," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 111(C), pages 85-97.
    5. Paul Collier & Anke Hoeffler, 2002. "AID, Policy and Peace: Reducing the risks of civil conflict," Defence and Peace Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 13(6), pages 435-450.
    6. Francesco Amodio & Leonardo Baccini & Michele Di Maio, 2021. "Security, Trade, and Political Violence," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 19(1), pages 1-37.
    7. Elisabeth Gilmore & Nils Petter Gleditsch & Päivi Lujala & Jan Ketil Rod, 2005. "Conflict Diamonds: A New Dataset," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 22(3), pages 257-272, July.
    8. Phoebe W. Ishak & Mohammad Reza Farzanegan, 2022. "Oil price shocks, protest, and the shadow economy: Is there a mitigation effect?," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 34(2), pages 298-321, July.
    9. Ang, James B. & Gupta, Satyendra Kumar, 2018. "Agricultural yield and conflict," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 397-417.
    10. Sandbu, Martin E., 2006. "Natural wealth accounts: A proposal for alleviating the natural resource curse," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 34(7), pages 1153-1170, July.
    11. Paul Collier & Anke Hoeffler, 2004. "Greed and grievance in civil war," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 56(4), pages 563-595, October.
    12. Anne D. Boschini & Jan Pettersson & Jesper Roine, 2007. "Resource Curse or Not: A Question of Appropriability," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 109(3), pages 593-617, September.
    13. Chen, Junyi & Kibriya, Shahriar & Bessler, David & Price, Edwin, 2018. "The relationship between conflict events and commodity prices in Sudan," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 40(4), pages 663-684.
    14. Baez, Javier E., 2011. "Civil wars beyond their borders: The human capital and health consequences of hosting refugees," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(2), pages 391-408, November.
    15. Brenner, David, 2015. "Ashes of co-optation: from armed group fragmentation to the rebuilding of popular insurgency in Myanmar," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 65546, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    16. Dana Schüler & Julian Weisbrod, 2010. "Ethnic fractionalisation, migration and growth," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 39(2), pages 457-486, October.
    17. James Lee Ray, 2005. "Constructing Multivariate Analyses (of Dangerous Dyads)," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 22(4), pages 277-292, September.
    18. Joan Esteban & Massimo Morelli & Dominic Rohner, 2015. "Strategic Mass Killings," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 123(5), pages 1087-1132.
    19. Arunatilake, Nisha & Jayasuriya, Sisira & Kelegama, Saman, 2001. "The Economic Cost of the War in Sri Lanka," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 29(9), pages 1483-1500, September.
    20. Sebastian Doerr & Stefan Gissler & José-Luis Peydró & Hans-Joachim Voth, 2018. "From finance to fascism," Economics Working Papers 1651, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Nov 2020.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0015169. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.