Aspiring for change: A theory of middle class activism

Revolution is a risky business. One of the risks involved stems from coordination failure. Because there is uncertainty concerning the extent of popular discontent, an individual contemplating to take action against the regime has to estimate how many people will be taking similar actions: a massive protest may overcome even a repressive regime, but isolated acts of defiance seldom succeed and can bring dire consequences for the dissenters. The coordination risk in revolutions has been studied in the literature using the global game approach. This approach typically assumes that a coordinated attack will bring net benefits to the participants. Less well studied is the risk arising from a successful revolt. In reality, post-revolution societies are beset by great uncertainty. There are instances when mass political actions altered the path of a country for the better, but history is also replete with examples of revolutions that turned sour. To be motivated to take costly political action, individuals have to believe that the chance of success is sufficiently high, and that things will change for the better if they are successful.  In other words, both the discontent against the status quo and the hope for a better replacement matter for individual decisions. In this paper, we argue that individuals at each segment of the economic spectrum make systematically different assessments of both risks. Such differences may explain why the poor are less inclined to participate in collective actions, while the middle class often spearhead mass movements in modern societies.  We propose a regime change model in which people are uncertain about both the quality of a specific regime and governance in general. The poor perceive the current regime as bad, and rationally infer that all governments are bad, and therefore believe mass movements are futile. The middle class are more sanguine about the prospect of good government, and they believe collective action is effective because they expect many fellow citizens to share the same view. This global game model does not admit standard monotone equilibrium. Instead, the decision to participate in collective action is non-monotone in economic status; we label it an interval equilibrium.  We develop new tools to analyze the existence and uniqueness of such interval equilibrium. We also provide evidence that is consistent with the model mechanisms and with the implications of our theory.