and _∂p_ ( _St, rt_ ) _/∂rt <_ 0; cf. footnote 9).

The fact that the revolution only starts once _St > S_<sup>_∗_</sup> , results from the notion that individuals need to pay a fixed start-up cost to form an opposition-movement.<sup>12</sup> This feature of our model ensures that dictators can get away with _some_ wrongdoing, which seems to be in line with reality: a revolution only arises once the public’s assessment of the dictator gets “bad enough”.<sup>13</sup> Agents in our model thus look at a dictator’s past performance in determining whether they find it worthwhile to revolt, which seems realistic and is somewhat analogous to the concept of retrospective voting (and note that such backward-looking behavior is not necessarily inconsistent with rationality; cf. Rogoff and Sibert (1988), Rogoff (1990), and Alesina and Cukierman (1990)).

The exact location of the Mogadishu line _S_<sup>_∗_</sup> , a tipping point beyond which a revolution mobilizes, is however unknown to the dictator (and see Kuran (1989) for evidence that the locations of such points are indeed surrounded by uncertainty). Consequently, the dictator is unsure about how much of the utility-generating non-congruent policy (in our setup: how much rent extraction) he can get away with, which is why he may choose to experiment along this dimension. Uncertainty on the location of the tipping point implies that there is a chance that initial wrongdoings will remain unpunished. Consequently, a dictator may become willing to “burn his hands” for the first time – even though he anticipates that this could lead to ex-post regret (since initial wrongdoings can perpetuate future ones, as will become clear later on).

The position of _S_<sup>_∗_</sup> is only revealed to the dictator once his actual stock _St_ crosses _S_<sup>_∗_</sup> , as he then observes the mobilization of an opposition-movement. If he observes no opposition at time _t_ , the dictator learns that _S_<sup>_∗_</sup> _> St_ and he updates his prior belief on the location of _S_<sup>_∗_</sup> accordingly using Bayes’ rule. Summarizing the dictator’s prior belief about the location of _S_<sup>_∗_</sup> with the c.d.f. _F_ ( _S_<sup>_∗_</sup> ), this implies that if _S_<sup>_∗_</sup> has not yet been reached at the point where the stock of wrongdoings equals _S_ , the distribution is updated to _F_<sup>_′_</sup> ( _S_<sup>_∗_</sup> ) via (see Zeira (1987, 1999)):

> 12See e.g. Acemoglu and Robinson (1999), Cabrales and Hauk (2011), and Fearon (2011) for similar models. One could also allow for an exogenous positive probability of the dictator losing power while _St < S_<sup>_∗_</sup> without affecting our results. That specification would make this case correspond to the state of peace identified by Besley and Persson (2011): in their peace-regime there is also no repression or revolution occurring, but the incumbent does face an exogenous probability of losing power.

> 13American “Founding Father” John Adams already noted this in his Papers, where he wrote that “people are so little attentive to government that there are no instances of resistance until repeated, multiplied oppressions have placed it beyond a doubt that their rulers had formed settled plans to deprive them of their liberties” (Adams, 1977 [1775]: 231).

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