CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has released an innovative new interactive dashboard for policymakers who want to better understand governmental instability around the world.
The Cline Center’s Coup d’Etat Project is the world’s largest registry of coups, attempted coups and coup conspiracies that have occurred since 1945, according to Scott Althaus, the director of the Cline Center and the Merriam Professor of Political Science at Illinois.
“The Coup d’Etat Project dataset is widely used by governments, intelligence agencies, corporations and risk managers around the world to analyze societal instability in the form of coups or coup attempts,” Althaus said. “It’s one of the most visible research projects at the Cline Center, but until now, the data wasn’t readily available in a user-friendly format.”
Before the new dashboard was put in place, users had to download the data and load it into their own statistical package to analyze it. So for journalists, diplomats, or “someone who wants to know what’s going on in the world” but lacking analysis skills, the data were just not as useful as they could be, Althaus said.
The solution is a just-released dashboard tool initially prototyped by Emmy Tither, a Ph.D. candidate in informatics at Illinois. Tither was mentored by an interdisciplinary team of scholars and experts spearheading the Coup d’Etat Project including Althaus; Loretta Auvil, a senior project coordinator at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and a data scientist at the Cline Center; and Joseph Bajjalieh, a senior research manager at the Cline Center. That team then further developed and enhanced Tither’s prototype dashboard into its current form.
The researchers even went so far as to perform an informal market analysis to assess what would be useful to journalists and diplomats around the world, Althaus said.
“We interviewed a senior advisor to Canada’s diplomatic corps, and they were able to give us some insights about how diplomats would be able benefit from our work,” he said. “We knew that if we could make our data easily accessible and readable to a lay audience, then that would allow policymakers to better understand human conflict problems, with the hope that they could ultimately make better-informed decisions about preventing or reducing societal instability.”
With that information in hand, the Cline Center team created a new, interactive dashboard with a world map that allows data to be sorted by country, region and time period.
“By opening up the data in a dashboard that doesn’t require you to code or possess any special skills to explore, we’re going to make this record of recent human history more transparent,” Althaus said. “It will increase understanding of what has happened and where things are going in ways that hopefully will also reduce misunderstandings about these contentious events.”
For example, one of the things that users can see in the dashboard is what variables the researchers collect, including what happened to the leader who was ousted in a successful coup.
“The end result is that we’ve lowered barriers for a much wider range of potential users who could benefit from this data, and that is a big part of our mission as a public engagement unit for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,” Althaus said.
Tither, who believes accessible communication to the general public is a crucial yet often overlooked component of the scientific research process, knew revamping the website presented both a challenge and an opportunity.
“Since I started my Ph.D., I knew that I didn’t want to go down the traditional academic path,” Tither said. “So being able to work on a project that supports both my academic and long-term professional goals is helpful. Working on this project helped me crystallize in a tangible way just how research can be of service to the public as a whole, which is the path I want my career to take after I complete my studies.”
For the Cline Center team, it was a learning opportunity and a team effort, Althaus said.
“We are following our campus’ land grant mission to put the products of academic research out into the world where they can be used to improve how the world operates,” he said. “Having a clearer understanding of what the recent history has been for coups and societal upheaval is very beneficial to navigate through the times that we’re in.”
The Coup d’Etat Project is made possible by the Nerad Student Research fund, private donors and endowment funding that supports the Cline Center’s mission.
