Coups and Clickbait...Lessons from the Wall Street Journal

As so-called "experts" on the study of coups and providers of commonly used data on coups, we commonly interact with various interested parties - for better or for worse. Public engagement can be useful as it can clarify some of the mystery associated with trends in coups. Given this year's recent run of coups, our research or opinions have appeared in many outlets, including The Economist, Spiegel, Washington Post, and various other international media. Sometimes these interactions go well, sometimes we probably provide underwhelming insights and every so often something frustrating happens.

Enter Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

A reporter for the outlet was among those recently asking about 2021's spike in coup activity. The exchange was fine, though there was a continued need to correct or put conditions on a continuing suggestion that 2021 is Africa's worst coup year since its independence era. The relevant portions of the exchange can be seen below (JMP=Jonathan Powell) 

WSJ

Based your research, it seems this sentence would be correct (2.6 coups a year globally in the 1960s).
​
"In Africa, this year has seen a quadrupling of coups after just one putsch in 2020--again in Mali--and an average of just two per year over the past decade. The number is as high as the years after African countries won their independence when generals seized power"
​
And could I attribute this to you based on your research?

​JMP

I would say that 2021's numbers are more in line with an average year from the 1960s or 1970s, but I want to be clear that 2021 is not "as high" as many of the years in that period. There were far fewer independent states during the peak in the 1960s as well, so the actual proportion of countries experiencing coups in that period would still have been notably higher than 2021. ​

WSJ

Thanks a lot!
So more levels not seen since the 1970s?

JMP

No. There have been individual years since the 1970s with as many attempted or successful coups in Africa. What is happening in 2021 is more in line with what was happening in the 1970s but there were years in the 1980s and 1990s with bad spikes. The early 1990s, for example, had more attempts than 2021 but fewer successes. If considering only successful coups, there will be a year or two with as many as 2021, but you would need to go back to 1980 for a year with a higher number. ​

WSJ

perfect yes we are referring to the successful ones 

There appeared to be a desire to offer an attention-commanding observation on how bad 2021 has been for coups in Africa. Though I made an effort to be clear that 2021 is not as bad as the 1960s or 1970s and that there have been a number of years since then either as bad (for successful coups) or worse (for all coup attempts) than 2021, it was wholly unsurprising to see the following headline:

Though not surprising, it makes it difficult to take the author and outlet seriously when basic, uncontestable facts are ignored in what is obviously an effort to present a clickbait headline that misleads anyone who reads it. 

To provide a better picture of what's happening we return to the data that the WSJ directly referred to when concluding that Africa is experiencing coups at its "Highest Level Since End of Colonialism" and that "Attempted or successful coups in Africa are occurring more frequently..." The yearly total of successful and failed coup attempts are illustrated in the figure below, based on five year increments.

​​Africa's 4 successful coups this year on on par with 1999 when putsches removed governments in Guinea-Bissau, Niger, Côte d'Ivoire, and Comoros. As was directly communicated to the journalist, you would need to go back to 1980 to see a year with more successful coups. That is a far cry from the "end of colonialism." 

If you disregard whether the coups succeeded or not, you would need to go back to 1991 to see as many attempted coups (9). More were also seen in 1980 (7). Again, hardly the "End of Colonialism" as the WSJ folks argue. ​Finally, the number of failed coups is only unusual within the context of the historically low rates seen in recent years. Even then, you would only need to go back to 2015, 2012, and 2011 to see as many failed coups occur in a single year in Africa.

​It has been a terrible year for coups by any standard. Commentators had largely come to celebrate the decline of coups and treated the events as afterthoughts, given the historically low activity recent years have seen. However, declaring coups in 2021 to be at their highest level since the end of colonialism is both an inaccurate portrayal of what is happening and--by relying on dynamics seen in one very short period of time--grossly underappreciates the threat of coups in Africa's early years.