Examining onsets of political instability in countries worldwide from 1955 to 2003, we develop a model that distinguishes countries that experienced instability from those that remained stable with a two-year lead time and over 80% accuracy. Intriguingly, the model uses few variables and a simple specification. The model is accurate in forecasting the onsets of both violent civil wars and nonviolent democratic reversals, suggesting common factors in both types of change. Whereas regime type is typically measured using linear or binary indicators of democracy/autocracy derived from the 21-point Polity scale, the model uses a nonlinear five-category measure of regime type based on the Polity components. This new measure of regime type emerges as the most powerful predictor of instability onsets, leading us to conclude that political institutions, properly specified, and not economic conditions, demography, or geography, are the most important predictors of the onset of political instability.

With the aim of fuelling open-source, translational, early-stage drug discovery activities, the results of the recently completed antimycobacterial phenotypic screening campaign against Mycobacterium bovis BCG with hit confirmation in M. tuberculosis H37Rv were made publicly accessible. A set of 177 potent non-cytotoxic H37Rv hits was identified and will be made available to maximize the potential impact of the compounds toward a chemical genetics/proteomics exercise, while at the same time providing a plethora of potential starting points for new synthetic lead-generation activities. Two additional drug-discovery-relevant datasets are included: a) a drug-like property analysis reflecting the latest lead-like guidelines and b) an early lead-generation package of the most promising hits within the clusters identified.

Przeworski et al. (2000) challenge the key hypothesis in modernization theory: political regimes do not transition to democracy as per capita incomes rise, they argue. Rather, democratic transitions occur randomly, but once there, countries with higher levels of GDP per capita remain democratic. We retest the modernization hypothesis using new data, new techniques, and a three-way rather than dichotomous classification of regimes. Contrary to Przeworski et al. (2000) we find that the modernization hypothesis stands up well. We also find that partial democracies emerge as among the most important and least understood regime types.

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IGeertz, Melson and Wolpe, Huntington and others have argued that modernization promotes potentially disintegrative forces in developing areas, and, in particular, often gives rise to powerful ethnic groupings. 1 In this article, we elaborate this hypothesis in the context of the developing nations of black Africa.In so doing, we also attempt to demonstrate the relevance and usefulness to political scientists of the extensive work on modernization in Africa produced by students of related disciplines, and fo draw from these studies evidence for our principal assertion: that in conterriporary Af rica, modernization and ethnic competition can and do covary.The first part of the paper is definitional: we clarify our usage of the major terms of our argument. The second part is evidential: drawing on the social science .literature from Africa, we attempt to demonstrate that the goods of modernity are desired but scarce; that modern iz ation therefore creates new patterns of stratification; and that both these phenomena engender patterns of ethnic competition in Africa. We then move to our basic problem of explanation. Given that modernization promotes competition, why is it-that this competition assumes ethnic form?