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This article addresses the highly variable middle-class attitudes regarding political transitions and suggests that social mobility is a key factor conditioning its behavior. Social mobility creates a trade-off for the middle class between autocracy, which yields lower redistribution today, and democracy, which guarantees higher redistribution tomorrow. The way this trade-off is resolved impacts middle-class attitudes toward democratic transitions. Even when the middle class prefers lower redistribution levels under autocracy today, the middle class may prefer democracy today to guarantee higher levels of redistribution in the future, if it feels vulnerable about its future prospects.

I address the role of social mobility in political transitions. I develop a political economy model of regime transitions that incorporates social mobility as a key feature of the economy capturing the political attitudes toward redistribution. I show that social mobility facilitates democratization by reducing the conflict over redistribution between the rich and the poor. Furthermore, it facilitates democratic consolidation by reducing the likelihood of a coup under democracy. On the other hand, social mobility helps to keep an authoritarian regime stable by reducing the likelihood of mass movements against political elites.

Do audience costs have to be extremely large in order to credibly signal resolve and affect international crises? Existing theoretical work on audience costs suggests an affirmative answer, and recent empirical work on audience costs focuses on whether a leader can generate such large audience costs as to create a commitment to fight where no such commitment previously existed. We analyze a richer crisis bargaining model with audience costs and find that (1) audience costs can have war-reducing effects on incomplete-information crisis bargaining through a noninformative, bargaining-leverage mechanism and (2) audience costs can have war-reducing effects even when such large audience costs are not being generated as to create a commitment to fight where no such commitment previously existed. Even more limited audience costs can have war-reducing effects in international crises. We discuss how the bargaining-leverage mechanism is consistent with a number of prominent historical cases.

AbstractAll rebel organizations start weak, but how do they grow and achieve favorable conflict outcomes? We present a theoretical model that allows for rebel organizations to gain support beyond their "core" and build their bargaining power during fighting. We highlight that rebel organizations need to win over crucial parts of society to generate the necessary support that allows them to attain favorable civil conflict outcomes. We find empirical support for the argument that low‐income individuals who initially fight the government (rebel organizations) have to convince middle‐class individuals to turn out against the government to gain government concessions. Empirically, we demonstrate that government concessions in the form of peace agreements and the onset of negotiations become more likely when protest occurs in the context of civil conflicts.Replication MaterialsThe data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: http://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MYDZNF.