Regime change, whether by revolution or coup d’etat, has been a staple of foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson called for “teaching them to elect good men.” Since then, American officials have engaged in regime-change missions all around the world, nominally in pursuit of stability, democratization, and America’s national interests. But scholarly research shows that armed regime-change missions rarely succeed as envisioned, and they tend to draw the intervener into lengthy state-building projects that can undermine economic growth, increase repression, and generate human rights crises.
This article explores two common mindsets that need to be shifted in order for regime-change policies to be more effective: First, officials must recognize that foreign polities have different priorities than the United States, and that changing those leaders is unlikely to change these differences. Second, officials must abandon the belief that a military intervention can lead to regime changes that are consistent with American values and interests.
We construct a model of anti-regime efforts that accounts for coordination and screen-ing considerations. The leader sets rewards that depend on the likelihood of success, and a maximum reward level is constrained by the ability to screen-in citizens with (endogenously) optimistic beliefs about the chances of success. Heterogeneous citizen beliefs also imply that citizens’ payoffs to contribute to the effort are not independent, and the leader needs to account for this by designing reward schedules with interdependencies. As the figure below illustrates, the leader can maximize induced contributions by designing reward schedules that are increasing and convex.
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