  Quantification of historical sociological processes have recently gained
attention among theoreticians in the effort of providing a solid theoretical
understanding of the behaviors and regularities present in sociopolitical
dynamics. Here we present a reliability theory of polity processes with
emphases on individual political dynamics of African countries. We found that
the structural properties of polity failure rates successfully capture the risk
of political vulnerability and instabilities in which 87.50%, 75%, 71.43%, and
0% of the countries with monotonically increasing, unimodal, U-shaped and
monotonically decreasing polity failure rates, respectively, have high level of
state fragility indices. The quasi-U-shape relationship between average polity
duration and regime types corroborates historical precedents and explains the
stability of the autocracies and democracies.
