An elite bargaining simulation on authoritarian breakdown, strategic uncertainty and negotiated democratization.
This simulation is inspired by Adam Przeworski's theory of democratic transitions. Its central premise is that democratization is not the automatic consequence of democratic values, economic development or social pressure. It emerges from strategic interaction among actors who face uncertainty about the future and who must decide whether bargaining, continued authoritarianism or open competition offers the safest outcome.
The authoritarian regime remains in place, but its legitimacy is weakening. Political, economic and social elites are increasingly open to regime change, although they do not necessarily agree that the new regime should be democratic. Players must therefore decide whether to preserve their own influence, coordinate with members of their block, bargain across political divisions, or accept a reduction in power in order to make a democratic transition possible.
Points represent accumulated political influence and bargaining power. Because points normally increase throughout the simulation, a successful democratic transition requires actors to limit the total accumulation of power in the system. Competition can therefore become paradoxically useful: players may need to reduce one another's accumulated points in order to keep the system below the democratic threshold.
The simulation is designed for fifteen players or fifteen small groups. Each player represents a political, institutional, economic or social actor involved in the transition process.
Players belong to three strategic blocks. Membership creates shared interests, but actors within the same block do not necessarily have identical preferences and may compete with one another.
The simulation can be played with a single broad item representing political power and influence. Allocation, cooperation and competition therefore express different ways of using political resources during the transition.
Represents the actor's accumulated capacity to influence negotiations, protect institutional interests, impose costs on rivals and shape the emerging political order.
The central tension of the simulation comes from the fact that individual, block and system-level incentives can point in different directions.
Each player has an incentive to preserve or increase its own political influence. If democratic transition fails, relative position becomes crucial and the strongest actors may be rewarded for outperforming their rivals.
This creates a permanent temptation to abandon collective restraint and maximize individual power instead.
Members of the same block share broad strategic interests: regime actors seek guarantees and survival, pact-oriented reformers seek an institutionalized opening, and pressure or uncertain actors try to shape the direction and costs of the transition.
Block solidarity is never absolute. Players may need to decide whether protecting the block is more important than improving their own relative position.
The democratic transition is the public good of the simulation. It benefits all participants when the total accumulated power of the system remains below the required threshold.
Achieving that outcome requires collective restraint under uncertainty. Every actor can benefit from democratization, but each also has an incentive to let others bear more of the cost of reducing power.
Victory conditions evolve during the simulation. This changing incentive structure is part of the political narrative and forces players to reconsider whether cooperation or competition is the rational strategy at different stages of the transition.
At the beginning of the simulation, the democratic threshold requires a 10% reduction in the maximum aggregate points of all players combined. If the final aggregate remains within that threshold, the transition succeeds and every participant receives an A. If the threshold is exceeded, every participant receives a C.
From Turn 6 onward, failure becomes asymmetric. If the democratic threshold is exceeded, only the highest-scoring players in Block A receive an A; all other players receive a C. The possibility of collective democratic success remains open, but the regime now has a stronger fallback incentive if negotiations fail.
A political assassination shakes the transition and destroys part of the trust accumulated during previous negotiations. The democratic threshold is reduced by an additional 10%, making a successful transition substantially more difficult and increasing the strategic cost of continued accumulation of power.
The simulation can end in a successful democratic transition or in a failed transition dominated by competitive accumulation of power. The result illustrates a central problem in democratic transitions: actors may collectively prefer a stable democratic settlement while individually having incentives to preserve enough power to protect themselves if the settlement collapses.
Individual success, block advantage and democratic transition do not necessarily coincide. Players must continuously decide how much political influence they are willing to sacrifice in exchange for a collectively acceptable and uncertain democratic order.
Materials, datasets and results from classroom implementations of this simulation will be published here when available.
No public download is currently available for this simulation.