Political Fragility: Coups d’État and Their Drivers

Aliona Cebotari, Enrique Chueca-Montuenga, Yoro Diallo, Yunsheng Ma, Rima Turk Ariss, Weining Xin and Harold Zavarce

No 2024/034, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: The paper explores the drivers of political fragility by focusing on coups d’état as symptomatic of such fragility. It uses event studies to identify factors that exhibit significantly different dynamics in the runup to coups, and machine learning to identify these stressors and more structural determinants of fragility—as well as their nonlinear interactions—that create an environment propitious to coups. The paper finds that the destabilization of a country’s economic, political or security environment—such as low growth, high inflation, weak external positions, political instability and conflict—set the stage for a higher likelihood of coups, with overlapping stressors amplifying each other. These stressors are more likely to lead to breakdowns in political systems when demographic pressures and underlying structural weaknesses (especially poverty, exclusion, and weak governance) are present or when policies are weaker, through complex interactions. Conversely, strengthened fundamentals and macropolicies have higher returns in structurally fragile environments in terms of staving off political breakdowns, suggesting that continued engagement by multilateral institutions and donors in fragile situations is likely to yield particularly high dividends. The model performs well in predicting coups out of sample, having predicted a high probability of most 2020-23 coups, including in the Sahel region.

Keywords: Fragility; Drivers of Fragility; Coup d’État; Machine Learning; coup dynamics; event study result; coup probability; probability of coup; IMF working paper 24/34; Fiscal stance; Income; Sub-Saharan Africa; Middle East and Central Asia; Caribbean (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66
Date: 2024-02-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cmp and nep-pol
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