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...

This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the conditions of self-enforcing democracy by analyzing the recent wave of autocratic transitions. Based on a game-theoretic framework, we work out the conditions under which governments may induce the diverse public authorities to...