Optimal Size of Rebellions: Trade-off Between Large Group and Maintaining Secrecy

Congyi Zhou

Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2021, vol. 16, issue 2, 157-183

Abstract: This paper studies a model of regime change in which a rebel leader seeking to mobilize supporters faces a trade-off between increasing the rebel group's size and risking information leaks. I find that repressing a rebellion via collective punishment — whereby not only rebel participants but also those individuals who knew about (but did not report) the rebellion are punished — may result in a smaller-sized rebel group than in the case of targeted punishment, under which only the actual rebel participants are punished. Authorities prefer collective punishment to induce information leaks from rebel groups, however one consequence of adopting collective punishment is that citizens are then put to side with the insurgency, which in turn reduces the regime's odds of survival. My findings also indicate that, whereas targeted punishment helps prevent rebellion by ordinary citizens who simply desire policy changes, collective punishment helps prevent a revolution staged by those who are driven by pecuniary rewards. Finally, if authorities compete with rebel leaders for support by threatening retribution against non-supporters, then both parties prefer using relatively harsh methods as a means of forcing civilians to choose sides.

Keywords: Formal modelling; political economy; civil conflict; comparative political economy; game theory; autocracy; comparative politics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00017112 (application/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jlqjps:100.00017112

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Quarterly Journal of Political Science from now publishers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucy Wiseman ().