New Model Quantifies Coordination Risks in Regime Change
Researchers have developed an estimable framework to separate the feasibility of a coup from the perceived benefits of overthrowing a government.
A new empirical model transforms global games theory into a tool for predicting regime instability by treating coups as coordination problems. While previous research relied on reduced-form approaches to link country characteristics to coup success, this framework explicitly models how actors coordinate based on their beliefs about regime strength.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05534
The model separates the feasibility of a regime overthrow from its desirability. This allows observable fundamentals to be mapped separately into beliefs about how strong a regime is versus the perceived gains from a rebellion. By using simulated maximum likelihood and a contraction mapping, the researchers can estimate the level of uncertainty agents have regarding a regime's actual strength.
This distinction provides a theoretical basis for decomposing political risk into structural vulnerability and active incentive. The framework enables counterfactual analysis by varying information quality, regime strength, and the benefits of overthrow to see how these shifts alter the likelihood of a coordination event.
Quantifying the gap between a regime's fragility and the incentive to act turns political risk from a binary observation into a measurable coordination equilibrium.