Explaining comparative economic development requires identifying the causes of institutional change. This column uses AI to analyse 120 years of newspaper coverage and produce a new index of uncertainty about a country's core institutions. In the countries studied, nearly every major shift in democracy happened when this index was high. Because it detects slow-building uncertainty that other risk measures miss, the index could serve as an early warning of institutional fragility.

Michael Callen, Gregory Levy, Saipremnath Muthukumaran, Jonathan Weigel and Noam Yuchtman

13 October 2026

Vox EU

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/detecting-institutional-change-it-unfolds-evidence-120-years-reporting

This work is published under POID and the CEP's Growth programme.