Political salience, endogenous bandwagoning, and regime resilience

We introduce political salience into a canonical model of attacks against political regimes, as scaling agents' expressive payoffs from taking sides. Equilibrium balances heterogeneous expressive motives with incentives to avoid sanctions by “bandwagoning” with the winning side. We examine comparative statics in political salience, which we characterize in terms of equilibrium stability as well as attack size. A main insight is that when regime sanctions are weak, increases in salience can pose the greatest threat to seemingly safe regimes: ever smaller shocks become sufficient to drastically escalate into full-blown attacks, i.e., the regime becomes less resilient. Stronger regime safeguards not only directly reduce incentives to attack but can overturn these effects, such that increases in salience boost regime resilience. Our results speak to charged debates about democratic resilience, by identifying how safeguards determine when a rise in citizen interest in political action can lead to a threat to democracy.