Understanding state failure: The State Degradation Index and foreign policy implications

The 2006 United States National Security Policy recognizes the dynamic nature of state fragility and the range of governance capacity that exists in weakened states. Yet international theory to explain the dynamic nature of fragile states, to identify the states that are failing, and to quantify the ranges of governance capacity and state performance is still being developed. This study establishes the first historical State Degradation Index (SDI) of state failure indicators and establishes policy implications based on the SDI.;This study tests three hypotheses: (1) there is more than one profile of state failure, the hierarchical ordering and valuing of security and economic public goods should indicate the level of strength or failure for each state, therefore state degradation should be quantifiable such that states' strength/weakness can be measured annually and compared across states and regions; (2) the probability of autocratic states failing should increase as both the size of the winning coalition decreases and the size of the selectorate increases; and (3) there should be a "tilt-point" in the combination of small winning coalition size and large selectorate size beyond which the probability of state failure significantly increases.;The SDI extends qualitative research into the qualitative domain. It captures nine security-breach and economic variables from 1960-1997 for over 160 states in the system. The index establishes relative economic performance by region, and assigns values for absolute security-breach events, and then weights these variables to obtain a total SDI score. These scores are arrayed along a continuum of 1 to 4, with one representing states that are not weak, 2 representing states that are weak, 3 representing states that are failing, and 4 representing states that are collapsed. The SDI answers a critical state failure scholarship question regarding indicators of state failure: "what was the level of state degradation for all states since 1960". The analysis of this dataset provides important direction for U.S. foreign policy decisions.