Political Fragility: Coups d’État and Their Drivers

IMF Working Papers, February 16, 2024

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Political Fragility: Coups d’État and Their Drivers

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Bibliographic details

• Authors: Aliona Cebotari, Enrique Chueca-Montuenga, Yoro Diallo, Yunsheng Ma, Rima A Turk, Weining Xin, Harold Zavarce
• Published: February 16, 2024
• Series: IMF Working Papers
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5089/9798400266751.001

Summary and approach

• Focus: explores drivers of political fragility by focusing on coups d’état as symptomatic of such fragility.
• Methods:
  • Event studies to identify factors that exhibit significantly different dynamics in the runup to coups.
  • Machine learning to identify stressors and more structural determinants of fragility, and their nonlinear interactions, that create an environment propitious to coups.

Key findings

• Destabilizing conditions that set the stage for a higher likelihood of coups:
  • Low growth.
  • High inflation.
  • Weak external positions.
  • Political instability.
  • Conflict.
• Interaction and amplification:
  • Overlapping stressors amplify each other’s effects.
  • These stressors are more likely to lead to breakdowns in political systems when demographic pressures and underlying structural weaknesses are present—especially poverty, exclusion, and weak governance—or when policies are weaker, via complex interactions.
• Countervailing effects:
  • Strengthened fundamentals and macropolicies have higher returns in structurally fragile environments for staving off political breakdowns.
  • Continued engagement by multilateral institutions and donors in fragile situations is likely to yield particularly high dividends.

Model performance and predictive results

• Out-of-sample performance:
  • The model performs well in predicting coups out of sample.
  • It predicted a high probability of most 2020-23 coups, including in the Sahel region.

Policy implications and recommendations

• Prioritize strengthening macroeconomic fundamentals and macropolicies in fragile contexts, as they yield higher protective returns against political breakdowns.
• Targeted support where demographic pressures and structural weaknesses (poverty, exclusion, weak governance) interact with economic, political, or security stressors.
• Maintain or increase engagement by multilateral institutions and donors in fragile situations given likely high dividends from such engagement.

Publication and metadata

• Authors: Aliona Cebotari, Enrique Chueca-Montuenga, Yoro Diallo, Yunsheng Ma, Rima A Turk, Weining Xin, Harold Zavarce
• Date: February 16, 2024
• Series: IMF Working Papers
• Issue: 034
• Volume: 2024
• Pages: 66
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5089/9798400266751.001
• ISBN: 9798400266751
• ISSN: 1018-5941
• Subject keywords: Environment, Fiscal policy, Fiscal stance, Income, Machine learning, National accounts, Population and demographics, Technology

Political Fragility: Coups d’État and Their Drivers, IMF Working Papers 2024/034 (February 16, 2024).

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