Societal-System Analytics and the Problem of Factionalism in Emerging (and Declining) Democracies

For over twenty years the U.S. Government's Political Instability Task Force (PITF; originally known as the State Failure Task Force) con-ducted extensive analysis and modeling of political instability and demo-cratic transition events. The two most recent phases of this research have identified the Polity indicator of 'factionalism' (PARCOMP=3) to be the most statistically powerful, precursive condition in modeling the onsets of serious political instability (Goldstone et al. 2005; Gold-stone et al. 2010). This paper reports on the authors' six-year analysis of the factionalism condition, which sought to document and confirm instances of factionalism in the contemporary period (since 1955) and identify common factors behind successful factionalism management strategies. The analysis began with a comprehensive review and ac-counting of every change in the Polity dataset since 1955. Through this review and documentation process, we found that transitions to-ward democracy that occurred in countries outside the global West (which occurred much earlier) were relatively rare and usually short-lived prior to 1985 but more recent transitions toward democracy have taken place far more frequently and, so far, have tended to per-sist (the so-called 'third wave of democratization'). Among these 'third wave' transitions, democratic regimes have been relatively sta-ble in former one-party systems and have taken place almost exclu-sively in countries with little or no serious armed conflict during the contemporary period. We note that military regimes tend to precede volatile democratic transition experience due to the factionalism man-agement strategy such regimes employ. One-party regimes, we hy-pothesize, are more successful at managing factionalism in the demo-cratic transition process and, so, have more stable and less violent transitions. We note that established, long-standing democracies are not immune to political instability situations but that these disruptions tend to be shorter in duration and involve more limited violence. This paper introduces a theoretical model of the factionalism condition and offers some preliminary quantitative analysis of the relationship be-tween factionalism outcome and pre-transition regime type.