Modeling Coups in Africa, 1960 to 1975 (1982)

Description

A data set on modeling coups in Africa using data from the period between 1960 and 1975 (1982). These data offer a partial replication of Jackman (1978).

Usage

african_coups

Format

A data frame with the following 11 variables.

iso3c

a three-character ISO code for state identification

country

an English country name

jci

Jackman's (1978) coup index from 1960 to 1975

tmis

Johnson et al.'s (1984) total military involvement score

agperc

an estimate of the percentage of the country's labor force in agriculture and animal husbandry

indperc

an estimate of the percentage of the country's labor force in industry

literacy_cnts

an estimate of countrywide literacy from around 1965

literacy_ba

another estimate of countrywide literacy from around 1965

leperc

an estimate of the size of the largest ethnic group, as a percentage

partydom

the percentage of the vote received by the largest party in the country prior to independence

turnout

the turnout (as a percentage) at the independence referendum

Details

Data exist for instructional purposes, especially about modeling interactions. Reading Jackman (1978) and Johnson et al. (1984) will provide more information about the data and hypotheses. There was a follow-up symposium on this in 1986 in American Political Science Review that may be an interesting read and provide even more context about what's at stake in this debate.

English country names are country names from around the time of publication. Take note of older names of "Dahomey", "Swaziland", "Upper Volta", and "Zaire." The three-character ISO codes are current, mostly for ease of doing other things with the data. However, this comes with the acknowledgment that Dahomey and Zaire used to have different ISO codes under their older names. Both codes for Dahomey (DHY) and Zaire (ZAR) were retired in 1977 and 1997, respectively.

Ideally, I'd have Morrison's (1972) Black Africa, but I do not. I have a copy of a 1989 update, though. That's what I consulted in constructing this data set.

Jackman (1978) is deceptively opaque on what he's doing for the ethnic group variable and arguably misleads on what his turnout variable is actually from. In the case of the ethnic group variable, it's the difference between saying the largest ethnic group in Rwanda is 98% of the population versus 80% of the population. In short, it's the difference of saying whether there are any Tutsi at all in the country. Basically, I'm uncertain with what he's doing with what Morrison et al. (1989) define as "ethnic clusters".

Mercifully, the coup variables come from a replication by Johnson et al. (1984). Based on Morrison et al.'s (1989) updated data, it's not clear how Jackman could've derived some of these estimates using the formula he said he used. For example, Benin should have a score of 39 based on the information in Table 2.10 (p. 373 in Morrison et al. (1989)). Cameroon should have a 1 and not a 2, per Table 5.10 (p. 399). My comments here work under the assumption that Morrison et al. are adding information and not revising information in the second edition of the Black Africa handbook.

To be more precise, both the Jackman coup index and total military involvement variables are directly copied from Table 2 in Johnson et al. (1984) on p. 627. Missingness in the Jackman coup index variable communicates the country was not included in his original study, but was included in the Johnson et al. replication.

Related: the agricultural variable is a midway point between columns B and columns C in Table 3.11 of Morrison et al. (1989). I do not think this is too far removed from what Jackman was looking at in an older version of the same data, but there will be slight differences. It's the difference of "these variables came from 1966" versus "this is an imputation of 1960 to 1970". The latter is what I offer here. I can only do so much here.

To continue this theme of the opacity in trying to reconstruct the data, it seems Jackman (1978, p. 1265) misleads the reader a bit in saying that the social mobilization index incorporates the percentage of the labor force that is not employed in agriculture. He seems to have meant that he's using the percentage of the labor force that is employed in industry. Otherwise, the summary statistics he reports could not be reproduced or reasonably approximated by way of Morrison et al. (1989). This industry percentage variable comes from Table 3.14 in Morrison et al. (1989) and is likewise a midway point between 1960 and 1970.

The literacy variables have suffices communicating where I obtained them. The Cross-National Time Series Database has a variable effectively communicating this information that I was using first in trying to recreate these data. These data come from 1965 in that data set. Jackman and Johnson et al. are assuredly using Morrison's almanac. That information is in Table 4.11 of Morrison et al. (1989), though it's possible the estimates contained therein are slightly different than what was reported in the first edition. I cannot know for sure.

Ethiopia is conspicuously missing in the party dominance variable. That's by design, and apparently its omission warranted ample discussion both by Jackman (1978) and Johnson et al. (1984). Johnson et al. (1984, fns. 4,5) argue it's a curious choice that can situationally influence the results that Jackman reports, but there are also lots of other choices made by Jackman (1978) that can influence these results.

I am 99.9% sure the turnout variable is Table 5.9 in Morrison et al. (1989). Jackman (1978) says this is from before independence but I'm confident he meant it was the turnout at the independence referendum.

References

Jackman, Robert W. 1978. "The Predictability of Coups d'etat: A Model with African Data." American Political Science Review 72(4): 1262-75.

Jackman, Robert W., Rosemary H. T. O'Kane, Thomas H. Johnson, Pat McGowan, and Robert O. Slater. 1986. "Explaining African Coups d'Etat." American Political Science Review 80(1): 225-49.

Johnson, Thomas H., Robert O. Slater, and Pat McGowan. 1984. "Explaining African Military Coups d'Etat, 1960-1982." American Political Science Review 78(3): 622-40.

Morrison, Donald George, Robert Cameron Mitchell, and John Naber Paden. 1989. Black Africa: A Comparative Handbook (2nd ed.). New York, NY: The Free Press.