*** Upcoming Research ***
Estimating the Causal Effects of Covert Actions on Institutional Quality in Sub-Saharan Africa
1. Motivation:
Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced repeated cycles of political instability since independence, with military coups d'état representing one of the most persistent threats to democratic consolidation and economic development. In the 1960s alone, over 30 coups occurred across the African continent, a pattern that has dangerously reemerged in the 2020s with successful military takeovers in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Gabon, and Sudan. Beyond the tragic local consequences, these events are often shadowed by deeper historical questions: What role did foreign powers play in engineering these regime changes? Moreover, do these interventions, whether foreign-engineered or purely domestic, systematically alter the quality of governance in ways that hinder long-term development?
The Pinochet case from the Commanding Heights documentary serves as a powerful counterpoint. The film presents a provocative argument: a brutal dictator, by hiring United States trained economists to implement free market reforms, could foster economic growth and stabilization. This created what some have called an authoritarian development model, where economic liberalization proceeds without democratic accountability. But this raises a critical question. Is the Pinochet model a generalizable path to development, or is it an exception that does not apply to contexts shaped by extractive colonial institutions and deep foreign interference? The Democratic Republic of Congo offers a stark contrast. A 2003 World Bank report revealed that this country, whose mineral wealth could have funded a generation of development, received only $87,000 in official diamond revenue in 2000. This tiny figure reflects the near total capture of resource wealth by elites, militias, and foreign interests, a testament to institutional failure and resource extraction.
This contrast motivates my central inquiry. Why did the Pinochet model succeed in one context and fail so spectacularly in others? This research seeks to answer this question by bridging two previously separate domains of inquiry: institutional economics, which measures the quality of governance, and the historiography of covert operations. By constructing a novel dataset that leverages the historic 2025 declassification of records related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and others, this project will, for the first time, quantitatively estimate the causal effect of CIA-involved military coups on long-term institutional quality, a cornerstone of economic development.
2. Research Questions:
The primary research question is:
"What is the causal effect of military coups on institutional quality in Sub-Saharan Africa, and does documented CIA involvement systematically moderate these effects?"
This overarching question will be addressed through three secondary lines of inquiry:
1. General Effect: What is the average causal effect of all coups on institutional quality metrics in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1996 to 2024?
2. Heterogeneity by Foreign Involvement: Do coups with documented prior CIA involvement or support have a measurably different effect on subsequent institutional quality compared to coups with no such foreign involvement?
3. Effect Moderation by Colonial Heritage: Does the effect of a coup (particularly those with foreign involvement) differ systematically between countries with a history of "extractive" colonial institutions versus "residential/settler" colonial institutions?
3. Literature Review:
This project is situated at the intersection of several mature but distinct literatures, drawing key insights from each.
A. Colonial Origins of Comparative Development
The foundational work by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001) established that the type of colonial strategy—extractive versus settler—has a profound and persistent effect on modern institutions. Countries where European colonizers faced high mortality rates, such as Ghana, were more likely to extract resources and establish weak governing structures that persisted after independence. Conversely, settler colonies with lower mortality rates, such as Kenya, developed more robust institutions. This "colonial heritage" variable will serve as a key moderator in my causal models.
B. Coup Literature
The study of coups has largely focused on their domestic determinants, predicting which nations are most at risk based on economic grievances, political exclusion, and military dissatisfaction. While research has noted the role of foreign powers in these events, it has struggled to systematically account for covert foreign support due to the classified nature of the evidence. This gap is precisely where this dissertation intends to make its most significant contribution.
C. Institutional Quality and Development
A large body of research, operationalized by the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), has demonstrated that high-quality institutions—characterized by rule of law, control of corruption, and government effectiveness—are central drivers of long-term economic growth. However, most research treats governance as a static or slowly evolving domestic variable and does not adequately account for sudden, externally influenced shocks like a military coup.
D. The Authoritarian Development Debate
The tension between authoritarian governance and economic performance is a recurring theme in political economy. The Chilean experience under Augusto Pinochet, as documented in the Commanding Heights series, has been cited as evidence that economic liberalization can occur even under repressive regimes when competent technocrats are empowered. Scholars have debated whether this represents a replicable model or a unique case shaped by Chile's particular history, its settler colonial institutions, and its strategic alignment with the United States during the Cold War. This dissertation engages with that debate directly by asking whether the "Pinochet hypothesis" travels to Sub-Saharan Africa. My central argument is that the developmental potential of post-coup transitions is systematically moderated by a country's colonial heritage and the nature of foreign involvement.
4. Data and Novel Contribution:
The project's core contribution is the creation of a multi-level panel dataset.
A. Institutional Quality (Outcome Variable)
The primary outcome will be the six dimensions of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI). The WGI 2.0 update provides a complete, recalculated time series from 1996 across over 200 economies.
B. Coup Events (Primary Treatment Variable)
The treatment variable for each country-year will be derived from the coups dataset maintained by the Center for Systemic Peace (CSP). This dataset provides detailed information on the date and outcome (e.g., successful vs. attempted) of coup events globally from 1946 to the present.
C. Colonial Heritage (Moderator Variable)
Countries will be coded based on the classification used by Acemoglu, Johnson & Robinson (2001), distinguishing "extractive" colonies from "settler/residential" colonies. This serves as a key moderating variable in my analysis.
D. Foreign Involvement in Coups (Novel Instrumental Variable)
The project's unique and causally crucial contribution is the creation of a novel binary indicator, CIA_Involvement. Coded at the country-year level, a value of 1 will indicate that declassified records confirm the existence of a CIA station or documented covert political action (e.g., surveillance, financial support for opposition groups, plotting) targeted at that country in the early 1960s.
This indicator serves two purposes:
1. As a key variable to test if foreign-involved coups have different effects.
2. As a powerful instrument to isolate the causal effect, as a foreign power's geopolitical interest (e.g., a CIA base) is a strong predictor of future coup involvement but is external and plausibly exogenous to a country's internal governance dynamics.
5. Methodology and Machine Learning Integration:
This project will pioneer a platform integrating traditional causal econometrics with advanced machine learning.
Phase 1: Feature Importance with ML
The initial analysis will train a Random Forest model to predict Institutional_Quality_{t+1} using lagged coup events, historical CIA involvement data, economic controls, and a wide array of other political and social indicators as features. The feature importance rankings will reveal which factors—specifically, the CIA_involvement indicator—are the most powerful predictors of future governance trajectories. The results will be compared using XGBoost.
Phase 2: Causal Modeling
Building on the insights from Phase 1, the core causal analysis will follow a two-stage strategy:
1. Baseline Models: The fundamental relationship will be estimated using Panel Fixed Effects Models to control for all time-invariant country-specific heterogeneity. This will be refined with an Instrumental Variables (IV) approach, using CIA_Involvement as a powerful instrument for coup events.
2. Advanced Causal ML: To estimate the heterogeneous effects of coups, the project will use Causal Forests, an ML method from the econml library. This powerful technique will model how the effect of a coup varies across nations based on their unique characteristics (e.g., colonial heritage, resource wealth).
3. Comparative Case Studies: For countries with clear CIA involvement, the project will implement Synthetic Control Methods (SCM). SCM builds a data-driven counterfactual to estimate what would have happened to a country's institutional trajectory had the foreign-influenced coup not occurred. This provides a powerful, intuitive validation of the broader statistical results.
6. Ethical Considerations and Feasibility:
The proposed use of declassified records to examine past foreign interventions does not involve the collection of new, sensitive data on living individuals. The analysis is focused on historical documents and publicly available aggregate indicators. As such, this project is not expected to require formal Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, but consultation with the IRB will be sought to ensure compliance with all university standards. Methodologically, the project is highly feasible; the WGI and CSP datasets are public, the AJR colonial data is well-documented, and the JFK records are now accessible online.
7. References:
Acemoglu, D., Johnson, S., & Robinson, J. A. (2000). The colonial origins of comparative development: an empirical investigation (No. w7771). National Bureau of Economic Research.
Acemoglu, D., Johnson, S., & Robinson, J. A. (2001). The colonial origins of comparative development: An empirical investigation. American Economic Review, 91(5), 1369-1401.
Adekera, D. (2025). Predicting coups in real time: A 4IR-based Early Warning Framework for the African Union. Journal of African Union Studies, 14(3).
Dube, A., Kaplan, E., & Naidu, S. (2008). Coups, Corporations, and Classified Information. UC Berkeley.
Kaufmann, D., & Kraay, A. (2024). The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Methodology and 2024 Update. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper.
Romano, T. P., et al. (2025). Reproducibility Package for 2025 Update of Worldwide Governance Indicators. World Bank.
Trump, D. J. (2025). Executive Order 14176: Declassification of Records Concerning the Assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
World Bank. (2025). Worldwide Governance Indicators, 2025 Revision.