Add to ORKGThe dynamics of popular rebellions against authoritarian governments are examined by focusing on how the public’s beliefs about the durability of an authoritarian government may have a self-fulfilling quality. This self-fulfilling quality gives both government and opposition leaders an incentive to make exaggerated “announcements ” about the likelihood of a rebellion in the near future. Yet if their predictions are too far off, they will lose credibility, and their future announcements will carry less weight. The case of Indonesia, where the government’s loss of credibility and the opposition’s ability to exploit this weakness led to a popu-lar uprising in 1998, is examined. A computational model consisting of a government, an opposition, a...