Democratic Transitions - Top-down transitions to democracy - A game-theoretic model of top-down transitions
3 important questions on Democratic Transitions - Top-down transitions to democracy - A game-theoretic model of top-down transitions
Top-down transitions to democracy frequency result from a split between soft-liners and hard-liners in an authoritarian regime. Soft-liners may want to introduce a policy of liberalization, which entails:
A controlled opening of the political space and might include the formation of political parties, holding elections, writing a constitution, establishing a judiciary, opening legislature and so on. The process is typically an attempt by dictatorial elites to co-opt opposition groups, or at least, to divide and control them.
One of the key assumptions underlying this analysis is that the soft-liners know what type of opposition they are dealing with, so there is a complete information game:
One in which each player knows all the information that there is two know about the game. Democratic transitions are not possible under complete information, as the only two outcomes are broaden authoritarianism or the status quo. Given there is preference falsification, it seems almost certain that authoritarian soft-liners will not always have complete information about the strength of their opposition. So democratic transformation can only occur when the regime mistakes the opposition for war, when it is in fact strong.
In an incompleet information game (in which a player does not know all of the relevant information about the other player's characteristics), it is necessary to calculate the soft-liners' expected payoff, which is:
The sum of the payoffs associated with each outcome multiplied by the probability with which each outcome occurs. The soft-liners will choose to open up and liberalize when the expected payoff from opening up is greater than the payoff from doing nothing.
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