ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the latest results of the Peace and Conflict Instability Ledger. It provides the ranking of countries around the world according to their estimated risk of experiencing significant bouts of political instability during the three-year period of 2014-2016. The chapter suggests how information from the Ledger can be used to help clarify risk trends in a particular country. Those risk estimates are obtained using a statistical forecasting model, developed based on historical data. The specification of the Ledger's forecasting model involved identifying risk factors for instability on which agreement about their relative importance was consistent among researchers. The risk ratios are estimated with varying levels of confidence, depending on the attributes of a given country. This is a standard, but underappreciated, aspect of statistical inferences. In many of the cases, the increase in risk can be traced to a single factor: a transition to more democratic governance that led to classification as a partial democracy.
