A Theory of Civil Disobedience
"From the streets of Hong Kong to Ferguson, Missouri, civil disobedience
has again become newsworthy. What explains the prevalence and extremity
of acts of civil disobedience? This paper presents a model in which
protest planners choose the nature of the disturbance hoping to
influence voters (or other decision-makers in less democratic regimes)
both through the size of the unrest and by generating a response. The
model suggests that protesters will either choose a mild 'epsilon'
protest, such as a peaceful march, which serves mainly to signal the
size of the disgruntled population, or a 'sweet spot' protest, which is
painful enough to generate a response but not painful enough so that an
aggressive response is universally applauded. Since non-epsilon protests
serve primarily to signal the leaders’ type, they will occur either
when protesters have private information about the leader’s type or when
the distribution of voters’ preferences are convex in a way that leads
the revelation of uncertainty to increase the probability of regime
change. The requirements needed for rational civil disobedience seem not
to hold in many world settings, and so we explore ways in which bounded
rationality by protesters, voters, and incumbent leaders can also
explain civil disobedience."
View the Full Text
No comments:
Post a Comment