How to predict a coup

By THE DATA TEAM

TWO AGEING PRESIDENTS, one bad and one awful, were forced from office this month: Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algeria and Omar al-Bashir in Sudan. Mr Bouteflika had been in power since 1999; Mr Bashir, since 1989. Their hasty and unlamented departures raise a question: how easy is it to predict a coup?

One obstacle to building a good coup-predicting model is that coups are extremely rare and becoming even more so. However, as our print-edition story explains, social scientists now have more tools than ever before at their disposal. Perhaps the most rigorous quantitative forecast of sudden regime changes is CoupCast, published by One Earth Future, an NGO.