War, Revolution, and Two-level Games: A Simple Choice-Theoretic Model

Abstract

"We focus on the decision problem of a government (or regime) facing external and domestic threats to it s security. For simplicity, we treat this governmental actor as a unitary rational actor. We also assume that this government (which we denote as actor i) faces threats from a set of other unitary actors, comprised of other governments j-1,2,...,J and domestic organizations or groups k-1,2,...K. Since government i must fin d some way to balance the threats posed by these various actors, and since dealing with tradeoffs between desired ends is the very essence of rationality, a rational choice approach seems particularly appropriate for modeling a government's efforts to manage two-level security problems. We assume that government i is fundamentally concerned with minimizing the probability that it will lose a war with any government j or that it will be overthrown after a revolution instigated by domestic groups k."