Spillover of military regimes in sub-saharan Africa

We analyse institutional spillover in military regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa, from 1972 through 2007, by means of a Markov chain transition model. This method allows us to study in a unified framework both the occurrence and the persistence of military dictatorships. We find a robust spatial autocorrelation between military governments in the short-run, but this process is shortly lived, since we observe an overall trend that reduces the number of military regimes. We find some interesting asymmetries between transition and persistence results, in particular for GDP and external hostility.