Supplementary Appendix to “The Foundations of Limited Authoritarian Government: Institutions and Power-sharing in Dictatorships”

As in the paper, suppose that allies use a threshold strategy according to which ally i supports the ruler if her signal ki is below some threshold k , ki ≤ k , and she rebels if ki > k . Since the signal ki is distributed uniformly on the interval [κ t − ε, κ + ε], a threshold signal k implies the existence of a threshold regime strength κ such that a rebellion fails if κ ≤ κ and succeeds if κ > κ. (Recall that a high κ corresponds to a weak regime, thus a rebellion succeeds when the regime is weaker than some threshold κ.) Suppose an ally observes the signal ki = k . What is the probability that a rebellion succeeds, κ > κ? If ki = k , then κ ∼ U [k − ε, k + ε]. In turn,