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10. Emerging markets

A week or so later we asked a senior executive at the firm why there was no direct mention of MENA in the ranking. We were told it was because there was only a small amount of perceived contagion risk. Lebanon might fracture but that wouldn’t lead to further instability, for example.

But as we’ve all noticed, God’s garment has been swishing by rather fast of late.

Political forecasting — like its economic sibling — is hard. Eurasia’s analysis is almost always insightful, and unlike some other firms it attaches probability estimates to its predictions rather than hedging its language with “may”s, “could”s or “should”s. Further, forecasting per se is only part of what customers pay for. Analysis of ongoing political debates and regulatory changes are also important.

But we wonder whether we’re any better at this type of forecasting than in 1989, when events in Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia took most analysts by surprise?

Missing nascent signs of Arab revolution — should such things exist — was far from a unique error, as confirmed in a presentation released Monday by Citigroup’s Senior Global Political Analyst Tina Fordham. She shows ratings from the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Risk Assessment Model, as of January 2011.

But there’s little reflection about why this happened and what political risk analysts should be doing to change their assumptions and models. Instead, the presentation looks at MENA’s current state and what might happen next.

In February 1790 Edmund Burke used a speech in Parliament to predict doom for the French revolutionaries. A couple of centuries later we’ll have to make do with this powerpoint slide:

That’s a little cruel, we know. But it’s odd to begin with the non-linearity of political transition and use an analytical tool that is inherently linear. (For more on this, see Edward Tufte.)

Have we really not improved since 1989? This is not a political science blog, but it seems that despite advances in understanding the causes of conflict and the rise of political prediction markets, we’re still not very good at appreciating the mechanics of political change.

However, one possibility is that in an effort to quantify, we neglect important evidence that is harder to measure. In other words, we’ve stretched too far to apply economic models to politics, and quantitative bias is the result.

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