Quote Originally Posted by jcustis View Post
These seem to me to be exceptionally apples and oranges comparisons.
My argument was, in part, that there are quite a few outliers, and that as a consequence the actual relationship between political inclusion, discrimination, and stability (let alone "success") was rather murky.

The State Failure Task Force Report (2000) for the USG provides some large-n statistical evidence of this. In Africa, for example, it certainly found that ethnic discrimination increased the risk of state failure (by a factor of 4.8). However, political inclusion also increases the risk of state failure by a similar or even larger amount (4.7 for full democracies, 30.1 for partial democracies). In Muslim countries (globally), interestingly, neither economic nor political discrimination has any statistically-significant effect on state failure, although might be a function of how discrimination is measured.

In short... murky