We assess Gordon Tullock's work on dictatorship and revolutions using a common analytic framework that captures the dynamics of mutually reinforcing perceptions within a potentially rebelling subgroup of a population. We can reconstruct all of Tullock's central findings but we also find him...

Threats of mass revolts could effectively constrain a dictator's public policy if it were not for the collective-action problem. Mass revolts nevertheless happen, but they follow a stochastic pattern. We describe this pattern in a threshold model of collective action and integrate it into an...

In this paper the political economy of revolutions is revisited, as it has been developed and applied in a number of publications by Acemoglu and Robinson. We criticize the fact that these authors abstract from collective-action problems and focus on inequality of income or wealth instead. In...