Three fun indexes for revolutions in the Middle East!

When political scientists (and sociologists and journalists) have too much time on their hands, they come up with inventive quantitative indexes for predicting and measuring the propensity for revolts. The Arab Spring has really fueled this sort of thing as of late. Here are the three most talked-about tools, all created since the Arab Spring.

First is the "revolting index" by Alen Mattich at the Wall Street journal. You can see it here at his blog.

Just as fun (even more so?) is Chrystia Freeland’s "uprising index" here.

The downloadable spreadsheet and narrative are here.

Note that Azerbaijan, according to these tools, is ripe for an Arab Spring-style revolution. (It's ranked the third-most likely country to revolt in Freeland's index!)

The Economist Intelligence Unit brings us a quantitative tool for predicting revolts in the Middle East only. Fun to look at, and you can change the weights of the factors by clicking on the "interactive shoe-thrower's index."