Will Those New Democracies Make It?

by Zack Beauchamp

Jay Ulfelder wraps his head around a statistical model suggesting Libya and Tunisia had about a 90% chance of remaining democracies, but Egypt's odds were a little under 50/50:

The contrast between Tunisia and Egypt’s survival prospects did not surprise me, but the high estimate for Libya did. Interestingly, expected economic growth seems to be contributing to this result. According to the IMF, Libya’s economy contracted by more than 60% in 2011, but it’s expected to recoup some of those losses in 2012 with an astonishing annual growth rate of nearly 70%. That value is so unusually large that it packs a lot of wallop, even though the weight for GDP growth in the equation is small. Whether that anomalous leap translates into a tremendous boost for democratic consolidation in the real world is another matter. Color me dubious.

Perhaps this result says more about the difficulty of applying broad predictive models to individual cases than anything else.

(Update: the original excerpt contained a mathematical error that Jay has since corrected. Current excerpt from the fixed post.)