Here’s a plot of observed and “predicted” rates of political instability onset around the world from 1956 to 2012, the most recent year for which I now have data. The dots are the annual rates, and the lines are smoothing curves fitted from those annual rates using local regression (or loess).

The observed rates come from the U.S. government-funded Political Instability Task Force (PITF), which identifies political instability through the occurrence of civil war, state collapse, contested state break-up, abrupt declines in democracy, or genocide or politicide. The observed rate is just the number of onsets that occurred that year divided by the number of countries in the world at the time.

The “predicted” probabilities come from an approximation of a model the PITF developed to assess risks of instability onset in countries worldwide. That model includes measures of infant mortality, political regime type, state-led communal discrimination, armed conflict in nearby states, and geographic region. (See this 2010 journal article on which I was a co-author for more info.) In the plot, the “predicted” rate (green) is the sum of the predicted probabilities for the year divided by the number of countries with predicted probabilities that year. I put predicted in quotes because these are in-sample estimates and not actual forecasts.

I see a couple of interesting things in that plot.

First, these data suggest that the anomaly we need to work harder to explain isn’t the present but the recent past. As the right-most third of the plot shows, the observed incidence of political instability was unusually low in the 1990s and 2000s. For the previous several decades, the average annual rate of instability onset was about 4 percent. Apart from some big spikes around decolonization and the end of the Cold War, the trend over time was pretty flat. Then came the past 20 years, when the annual rate has hovered around 2 percent, and the peaks have barely reached the Cold War–era average. In the context of the past half-century, then, any upticks we’ve seen in the past few years don’t seem so unusual. To answer the question in this post’s title, it looks like the world isn’t boiling over after all. Instead, it looks more like we’re returning to a state of affairs that was, until recently, normal.

Second, the differences between the observed and “predicted” rates suggest that the recent window of comparative stability can’t be explained by generic trends in the structural factors that best predict instability. If anything, the opposite is true. According to our structural model of instability risk, we should have seen an increase in the rate of these crises in the past 20 years, as more countries moved from dictatorial regimes to various transitional and hybrid forms of government. Instead, we saw the opposite. He or she who can explain why that’s so with a theory that accurately predicts where this trend is now headed deserves a…well, whatever prize political scientists would get if we had our own Fields Medal.

For the latest data on the political instability events PITF tracks, see the Center for Systemic Peace’s data page. For the data and code used to approximate the PITF’s global instability model, see this GitHub repository of mine.