Inspiring Regime Change

• In Event: Entering and Leaving Democracy

Abstract

We analyze how revolutionary leaders inspire participation in regime change. Drawing from sociological and historical literature, we model
a leader's problem as designing reward schemes that assign psychological rewards to different anti-regime actions. Regime change occurs when
the aggregate revolutionary effort from all citizens exceeds the uncertain regime's strength, about which citizens have private information.
Citizens face a coordination problem in which each citizen has a private (endogenous) belief about the likelihood of regime change. Because
optimistic citizens are easier to motivate, optimal inspiration entails optimal screening. Our approach decomposes this continuous action
global game with endogenous rewards into two separate, tractable problems of coordination and screening. A key result is the emergence of a
group akin to revolutionary vanguards, all of whom engage in the (endogenous) maximum level of revolutionary activity. In an extension, we show that heterogeneity among citizens (e.g., different levels of income or ideological convictions) reduces the likelihood of regime change.

Authors

• Mehdi Shadmehr, UNC-Chapel Hill

• Stephen Edward Morris, Princeton University