Political Instability Task Force

The Political Instability Task Force (PITF) is a panel of scholars and methodologists that was originally formed in 1994 to assess and explain the vulnerability of states around the world to political instability and state failure. The Task Force also encompasses research pertaining to onsets of general political instability defined by outbreaks of revolutionary or ethnic war, adverse regime change, and genocide. In the wake of September 11, the Task Force also turned its attention to relationships between states and international terrorist groups. The central objective is to use open-source data to develop statistical models that can accurately assess countries' prospects for major political change and can identify key risk factors of interest to US policymakers.^{[ref 1]}

Variables and Subcategories

This dataset include indicators in the Geography Variables category, subcategory Borders and Region.

This data can answer questions like:

• What is the number of bordering states with major civil or ethnic conflict?

Data Quality

Four distinct types of state failure events are included in the dataset: Revolutionary War, Ethnic War, Adverse Regime Change, and Genocide or Politicide. Such an approach carries the risk for concept misformation: for example, are revolutionary war and ethnic war always a distinct groups of cases?^{[ref 2]}

In general, complex events are made up of two or more temporally-linked wars and crises. For this purpose, if events overlap or if five years or less separate the end of one event and the onset of the next, they have been combined (or "consolidated") for analytic purposes (i.e., the "consolidated" or "complex" event is used as the dependent variable in statistical analyses).

Some war events are coded as both a political and an ethnic war event simultaneously; these cases have characteristics of both event types. As it is not possible to disaggregate the coded magnitudes of combatants and supporters, fatalities, and area affected, event magnitudes are simply repeated for the duplicate records under both event types. This can result in a problem of double counting when events of different types are aggregated or compared.

The recent political restructuring that many former Socialist Bloc countries have undergone has created many new states and, thus, complicated data compilation. Be aware that data inconsistencies may be found, especially in regard to the former-Soviet states, as conflict processes transcend temporal alignments. For example, the USSR is coded through 1991 but many of its constituent republics begin coding in 1990, resulting in what appears to be double, or over-lapped, coding of processes in that region. Also, conflict processes in the newly constituted states often have their beginnings in the former alignment, so, beginning years listed (Begin-Yr) may have occurred prior to statehood.^{[ref 3]}

References

1. ↑ "Political Instability Task Force" George Mason University, http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/pitf/.
2. ↑ Daniel Lambach and Dragan Gamberger, "Temporal Analysis of Political Instability through Descriptive Subgroup Discovery," Conflict Management and Peace Science Vol. 25, No. 19, 2008.
3. ↑ "PITF Problem Set: Dataset and Spreadsheets," George Mason University, http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/pitf/pitfcode.htm.

Political Instability Task Force Marshall, Monty G., Ted Robert Gurr, and Barbara Harff. 2001. Political Instability Task Force Dataset and Coding Guidelines< http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/pitf/pitfpset.htm>