An economic model of regime change: Freedom as a public good

This paper analyses regime change via a peaceful revolution. Under these circumstances, peaceful manifestations of unrest reach a point at which the prevailing political system collapses and is replaced by a system which provides more freedom. Such regime change occurred in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria. It is shown that the successful quest for freedom may be explained as a dynamic game. The game has a unique strong equilibrium — that is, a Nash equilibrium robust against mass defections — which arises in consequence of a trigger strategy which is similar to the Tit-For-Tat strategy in a repeated Prisoners' Dilemma.