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Radicalism in Mass Movements: Asymmetric Information and Endogenous Leadership

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2020

HENG CHEN Open the ORCID record for HENG CHEN [Opens in a new window]  and
WING SUEN Open the ORCID record for WING SUEN [Opens in a new window]
HENG CHEN*
Affiliation:
University of Hong Kong
WING SUEN*
Affiliation:
University of Hong Kong
*
Heng Chen, Associate Professor of Economics, Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong, hengchen@hku.hk.
Wing Suen, Professor of Economics, Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong, wsuen@econ.hku.hk.
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Abstract

Asymmetric information and diverse preferences for reform create an agency problem between opposition leaders and citizens. Dissatisfied citizens are unsure of how bad the current situation is but infer this information from the scale of the leader’s reform proposal. Because radical leaders have an incentive to exaggerate and mislead, to command credibility, they must paradoxically radicalize the proposal further as a way of signaling the necessity of change. Radicalism motivated by signaling is costly, as it reduces a movement’s chances of success. This mechanism also contributes to leadership radicalization when the leaders of movements arise as a compromise among diverse interests.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 115 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 286 - 306
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

We thank Navin Kartik, Balazs Szentes, Xianwen Shi, and seminar participants at the Asian Meeting of the Econometric Society (2019), Political Selection Workshop (2019) and Allied Social Sciences Association annual meeting (2020) for their comments. This research project is partly supported by the General Research Fund of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (Project No. 17504718) and by the Seed Fund for Basic Research of Hong Kong University (Project No. 201811159002).

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