Rebellion!

Transparency International ranks world governments according to their Corruptions Perception Index (CPI). The higher the value of the CPI, the less corrupt the government seems to its people. According the 2009 CPI Survey, the US ranks 19th with a CPI of 7.5. Iran ranks 168th (out of 180) with a CPI of 1.8.

Each week more and more citizens take to the streets of Iranian cities to protest the government's corruption.

The government responds with more police and heavier penalties.

Models/Sociology/Rebellion

This is a NetLogo implementation of Epstein's Model of Civil Disobedience. We can control the density of police, the density of agents (citizens), the legitimacy of the government, the maximum jail term for civil disobedience, and vision, the distance cops and agents can see.

Agents (who aren't in jail) and cops wander around randomly.

On each turn a cop (blue triangle) will randomly select a rebelling agent (red circle) within his radius of vision, move to his patch, and throw him in jail (turn him from red to black) for some number of cycles up to the maximum prison term.

On each term an un-jailed agent will decide to rebel (turn red) or be quiet (turn green). The shade of green is proportional to the agent's level of grievance against the government. Pale green agents are more satisfied than deep green ones.

An agent rebels if his level of grievance against the government is greater than the probability of arrest times risk aversion:

grievance - risk-aversion * estimated-arrest-probability > threshold

where:

risk-aversion is set randomly at birth.

threshold is a small constant set in the model.

grievance is perceived-hardship * (1 – government-legitimacy), where perceived-hardship is determined at birth (paranoia). Notice that as government legitimacy decreases, a person's innate paranoia gets multipled.

estimated-arrest-probability is 1 – e^-C/A where C is number of cops visible and A is number of rebelling agents visible. Basically, this says that if C/A is big, then the estimate increases.

Pretend you are Ahmadinejad, "president" of Iran. Use Rebellion to compare different strategies. Start by creating a government with maximum legitimacy and minimum jail terms for protestors. Slowly decrease legitimacy, watching the rebellions erupt. Now slowly increase the jail time and watch the population quiet down. Repeat the experiment with more police. What should Ahmadinejad do?

Notice the spikiness of the active agents graph. This is an example of punctuated equilibrium: the tendency for a system to remain stable over a long period of time, then change suddenly. What other examples of punctuated equilibrium can you think of?