In the Cold War, American policymakers often used regime change as a tool to expand their global influence. But covert efforts to topple foreign leaders typically backfired. Even when they succeeded, they sparked blowback that undermined long-term U.S. interests and tied the United States to dictators that were more hostile to American interests than the leaders they overthrew.
A key reason for these failures is that externally-imposed leaders face a domestic audience as well as an international one, and the latter’s preferences are often different. Taking actions to please the former alienates the latter, and this divide drives a wedge between patrons and their proteges. Moreover, the actions taken by imposed leaders often erode democracy, for example by reshaping a nation’s judicial framework in a manner that promotes autocracy.
In this article, we use a novel data set to show that citizens’ private information about their government’s chances of overthrowing it leads them to exert an optimal amount of effort in support of revolution. We then find that the higher the degree of this exogenous heterogeneity, the less likely it is to overthrow a given government. Our results are driven by two forces: first, strategic uncertainty (i.e., citizen beliefs about the probability of a regime change) gives rise to endogenous heterogeneity in citizens’ effort; and second, there is “screen-ing,” i.e., a leader can condition rewards on citizens’ level of optimism. This enables the leader to fine-tune incentives so that citizens with higher levels of optimism exert more effort than those with lower levels.
About the Author
