Political Salience 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 concerns with material bandwagoning incentives. We examine comparative statics in salience that fully characterize the stability of equilibria. A main insight is that when regime sanctions are weak, increases from low to middling salience can pose the greatest threat to regimes – even very small shocks can suffice to drastically escalate attacks. Our results speak to the charged debates about democracy, by identifying conditions under which heightened interest in political decision-making can pose a threat to democracy in and of itself.