“Sparks and Prairie Fires: A Theory of Unanticipated Political Revolution”, 1989-04 ():
A feature shared by certain major revolutions is that they were not anticipated. Here is an explanation, which hinges on the observation that people who come to dislike their government are apt to hide their desire for change as long as the opposition seems weak.
Because of this preference falsification, a government that appears unshakable might see its support crumble following a slight surge in the opposition’s apparent size, caused by events insignificant in and of themselves.
Unlikely though the revolution may have appeared in foresight, it will in hindsight appear inevitable because its occurrence exposes a panoply of previously hidden conflicts.
Introduction: Certain political revolutions in modern history, including the French Revolution of 1789, the Russian Revolution of February 1917, and the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, took the world by surprise. Consider the Iranian Revolution. None of the major intelligence organizations—not even the CIA or the KGB—expected Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s regime to collapse. Right up to the revolution, they expected him to weather the gathering storm. Retrospective perceptions notwithstanding, the Shah’s fall came as a surprise even to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the fiery cleric who, from exile, masterminded the revolutionary mobilization process that was to catapult him to Iran’s helm.
In hindsight, these revolutions seem anything but surprising. The literature they have spawned put forth a wealth of explanations: disappointments, governance failures, class conflicts, foreign exploitation, and so on. Plausible as at least some of these seem, they leave unanswered the question of why hindsight and foresight diverge. Why does a revolution that, in hindsight, seems to be the inevitable outcome of powerful social forces, surprise so many of its leaders, participants, victims, and observers?
My objective in this paper is to resolve this paradox. I do so with the aid of a collective choice model that distinguishes between individuals’ privately held political preferences and those they espouse in public. The central argument goes as follows: A privately hated regime may enjoy widespread public support because of people’s reluctance to take the lead in publicizing their opposition. The regime may, therefore, seem unshakable, even if its support would crumble at the slightest shock. A suitable shock would put in motion a bandwagon process that exposes a panoply of social conflicts, until then largely hidden. From these newly revealed conflicts, almost any writer with a modicum of imagination will be able to construct an elaborate explanation, consistent with almost any social theory, as to why the observed revolution took place.