The Dynamics of Polarisation and Revolutions

Political polarisation has become a prevalent phenomenon in the past decades. Parallelly, citizens have increasingly resorted to collective actions to demand change, resulting in incidents such as the Jan 6 US Capitol riot. Evidence suggests that such public remonstrations exacerbated the extent of opinion divergence. This paper therefore presents a model that explains the dynamic connection between political polarisation and collective actions. In the setup, voting, abstention, and participation in collective actions are novelly modelled as individual components of a citizen’s political toolkit. With endogenous voter preferences alone, polarisation has an exacerbating but limited effect on the level of collective actions. In turn, collective actions accelerate the process of polarisation for the election-losing partisans, creating asymmetry in the voter distribution. It is only when combined with strategic behaviour of the parties that polarisation may lead to substantially intensified collective actions.