Announcement, credibility, and turnout in popular rebellions

The dynamics of popular rebellions against authoritarian governments are examined by focusing on how the public's beliefs about the durability of an authoritarian government may have a self-fulfilling quality. This self-fulfilling quality gives both government and opposition leaders an incentive to make exaggerated "announcements" about the likelihood of a rebellion in the near future. Yet if their predictions are too far off, they will lose credibility, and their future announcements will carry less weight. The case of Indonesia, where the government's loss of credibility and the opposition's ability to exploit this weakness led to a popular uprising in 1998, is examined. A computational model consisting of a government, an opposition, and a population of citizens with heterogeneous preferences is developed to explore how announcements by the opposition and the government can influence the likelihood of rebellion. Results suggest that when the government's credibility is high, the opposition can do little to inspire rebellions; however. a small loss of credibility, if capitalized on by the opposition, markedly boosts the chances of a rebellion. When the public's underlying preferences are polarized, the likelihood of a rebellion drops sharply.