Public Communication in Regime Change games

Abstract

We study a regime change game in which the state and an opposition leader both observe the regime's true strength and may engage in costly communication by manipulating the mean of citizens' private signals. Each citizen then decides whether to attack the regime; the citizens take their private signals at face value and do not discount or attempt to undo propaganda or counter-propaganda. From the perspective of both the state and the opposition, the size of the attack is uncertain, as the number of committed partisans - those who always attack regardless of their signal - is not observed in advance. We show that a regime on the brink of collapse optimally refrains from propaganda, while the opposition engages in counter-propaganda. The equilibrium level of counter-propaganda increases with the opposition's benefit-cost ratio and with the precision of citizens' private signals, and decreases with the cost of attacking.