Popular Protest and Elite Coordination in a Coup d’état

Strategic Logic of Elite Purges in Dictatorships

“…People's incentives to take political action against the regime depend on their expectations about how many others will turn out and protest against the regime. Importantly, a mass political turnout in one time period is considered to influence the size of political turnout in the following period, as an individual modifies his beliefs about how many others oppose the regime based on the observed turnout numbers (Lohmann, 1994;Casper & Tyson, 2014). Specifically, a mass protest activity at one time shows the number of people who are engaged in the protest, and this in turn changes each individual's expectation about others' actions in the following period (Kuran, 1991).…”

Information Manipulation, Policy Reform and Authoritarian Survival

“…Nevertheless, in our model, as in Edmond (2013) and Huang (2014), we allow "soft information," information that is not verifiable by citizens, and consider the government's strategic choice of not only whether to disclose information but also how to disclose it. This paper also contributes to a growing literature on the relationship between government manipulation of information and citizens' collective action (e.g., Bueno de Mesquita 2010; Hollyer, Rosendorff and Vreeland 2011;Shadmehr and Bernhardt 2011;Egorov and Sonin 2012;Little 2012;Edmond 2013;Lorentzen 2013;Casper and Tyson 2014;Dimitrov 2014;Gehlbach and Sonin 2014;Little 2014a;Little 2014b;Lorentzen 2014;Shadmehr 2014a;Shadmehr 2014b;Smith and Tyson 2014;Hollyer, Rosendorff and Vreeland 2015a;Hollyer, Rosendorff and Vreeland 2015b;Little 2015;Lorentzen 2015;Rundlett and Svolik 2015;Shadmehr and Bernhardt 2015). Different from collective-action models based on (partially) common-value global games, our model is built upon the technics in Palfrey and Rosenthal (1985), and assumes private and independent values among citizens.…”

Coercive Leadership

“…Before moving on, we pause to discuss the role of information and its interpretation in our model. First, the coordination problem between agents we model arises from two distinct sources: agents' idiosyncratic preference component, h , which drives a wedge between them in terms of their action choices, and the lack of a common understanding of the state of the world (formalized through private signals), which is a source of coordination failure even in the absence of idiosyncratic differences in preferences (see, e.g., Casper and Tyson ; Tyson and Smith ). Although the social inefficiencies that arise just from the interaction of a coordination incentive and incomplete information are important (and present in our model), they have been analyzed in previous work in a context with exogenous information sources (Angeletos and Pavan ; Morris and Shin ).…”