Was the attack on the US Capitol an attempted coup?

Rather than debate that question here (or in another forum), I'm making it an assignment. Specifically, I'm asking my Quantitative Security students to determine if it belongs in our coup/attempted coup datasets.

[THREAD]

A core goal of this course is to introduce students to how Large-N data on violence and security are created.

We put WAY TOO much emphasis on estimators & software (Stata v R 🙄); not enough on the quality of the data going into the analysis.
First, what happened? @johncarey03755 offers a succinct explainer

https://t.co/oNNACsl6Z4
Second, I'll ask the students to read some of the recent pieces that say the event was NOT a coup attempt.

These include...
...detailed twitter threads by @HarknessKristen...

https://t.co/dyFBxlMGMt
...and by @naunihalpublic.

https://t.co/oyvCZPRTiH
They also include this @washingtonpost article that quotes @naunihalpublic & @esdebruin

https://t.co/dRLmleKQky
Speaking of @esdebruin, she wrote an earlier thread that also details conditions for considering an event to be a coup

https://t.co/3VZHAo35uX
And then there is the pedantry of @smsaideman 😉

https://t.co/08yVTIW31y
Third, I'll the give the students articles that make the case for this event BEING a coup.

Those include...
...@profmusgrave's @ForeignPolicy piece...

https://t.co/dyiHV5nBTx
... @JHWeissmann pointing to the work of the Cline Center...

https://t.co/pdxbxJ9B1h
... and @dhnexon's blog post (though his says it's BOTH a coup and an insurrection)
https://t.co/HMYTUVrhEp
Third, the students will look at some of the recent coup data projects to understand the coding rules that scholars use to create "coup attempt" datasets.

These include...
...the Powell & Thyne data on coups & coup attempts...

https://t.co/9n8jdgdZ5r
...The Cline Center data on coups...

https://t.co/Y7e9SdBxQM
... and Chapter 3 of @naunihalpublic's book.

https://t.co/dlFWMPtlUL
Fourth, I'll ask the students to answer this question:

"based on what you read and based on the coding criteria used in the datasets you explored, should the event of Jan 6 be included as an observation in a coup attempt dataset?"
I'm VERY curious to see how the students respond. I'll report the findings soon!

[END]
Addendum: The students could consider "self-coup", as Fiona Hill argues here (which is also a category in the Cline Database)

https://t.co/xhVElSAcoj

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[THREAD]


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By 1988, there already existed enough studies on the topic for Jack Levy to famously label Democratic Peace "an empirical law"


The earliest empirical work on the topic was the 1964 report by Dean Babst published in the "Wisconsin Sociologist"


Using the war participation data from Quincy Wright's "A Study of War", Babst produced the following two tables


The tables show that democracies were NOT on both sides (of course, Finland is awkward given that it fought WITH Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union).

Babst expanded his study beyond the World Wars in a 1972 paper in Industrial Research. He confirmed his finding.

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Typically excellent piece from @dsquareddigest The exponential insight is especially neat. Think of it a little like fishing...today you can’t export oysters to the EU (because you simply aren’t allowed to), tomorrow you don’t have a fish exporting business (to the EU).


The extremely small minority of people who known anything about this who think that Brexit will be good for the City make a number of arguments which I shall address in turn...

1. They need us more than we need them. This is a variant of the German carmakers argument. And we know how that went...Business will follow the profit opportunity and if that has moved then so will the business...

And what do we mean by us / we. We’re not talking about massed ranks of Euro investing / trading etc blue blooded British institutions.

Au contraire. We’re talking about the London based subs of US, Asian and indeed European capital markets players...As soon as they think the profit opportunity has moved then so will they...it’s a market innit...

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44 media queries
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46 unique font sizes
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The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.