Regime Insiders and Revolution

We examine a political revolution in the context of a global game with two opposing groups -- regime supporters and revolutionaries. Both citizens and regime elites use public and private information of regime strength to judge the likely actions of others and hence decide whether or not to support the regime. The novel aspect of our approach is that the actual size of the rebel force as well as the size of the regime supporters, and therefore the likelihood of a successful revolution and the level of violence, is endogenously determined by the equilibrium strategies of individuals. Our results integrate aspects from the dominant theories of revolution -- structuralist and subjectivist -- and account for why revolutions are notoriously difficult to predict.