Autocracy and the public: Mass revolts, winning coalitions, and policy control in dictatorships

Thomas Apolte

No 5/2015, CIW Discussion Papers from University of Münster, Center for Interdisciplinary Economics (CIW)

Abstract: Threats of mass revolts could effectively constrain a dictator's public policy if it were not for the collective-action problem. Mass revolts nevertheless happen, but they follow a stochastic pattern. We describe this pattern in a threshold model of collective action and integrate it into an agency model which demonstrates how mass revolts can impact on a winning coalition's incentives to keep backing an incumbent dictator. Having observed public policy and found a sufficiently high posterior probability of the dictator to be of a "bad" character, the winning coalition's members may exploit an incidentally happening mass revolt for escaping a loyalty trap that had otherwise prevented them from switching to disloyalty. While this explains why mass revolts sometimes happen to oust a dictator, the arising policy constraints in dictatorships may nevertheless be weak in practice.

Keywords: Autocracy; Revolutions; Threshold Models; Selectorate Theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D02 D74 H11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ciwdps:52015

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