Social Interactions, Group Dynamics, and the Political Economy of Sovereign Transgression: A Laboratory Investigation

The current political economy literature on sovereign transgression and citizen resistance emphasizes how the state can use a ''divide-and-conquer strategy to prevent coordinated citizen resistance from taking place to extract surplus from citizens. The current literature, however, does not consider how social interactions may trigger considerations beyond narrow self-interest and facilitate citizen cooperation in resisting sovereign transgression. It also has not studied the importance of social dynamics within citizen groups. The is proposal describes a series of laboratory experiments to study how different kinds of prior social interactions, and group dynamics, can affect the incidence of sovereign transgression and citizen resistance.