At times, the United States has sought to remove foreign governments from power in pursuit of its national interests. These covert regime change efforts often failed to achieve their basic purposes and sparked blowback that worsened relations with the United States.
There is now a growing scholarly consensus that regime change rarely achieves its desired goals and often produces deleterious side effects. These include a higher probability of civil war, increased human rights violations, and dragging the foreign intervener into lengthy nation-building projects. Yet some policymakers continue to advocate for forcible regime change. These officials are often guided by cognitive biases that lead them to focus on the desirability of the desired goals and ignore the full resources required to achieve them.
These political, economic, and military factors can help explain why regime change is so hard to execute. Our article demonstrates that a key reason is the presence of strategic uncertainty. Citizens observe heterogeneous signals about the relationship between democracy and growth and then choose regimes to maximize their survival probabilities. These choices are biased by information asymmetry, coordination considerations, and screen- ing.
Our analysis also suggests that a lack of political will can further limit the success of regime change. It can be difficult for leaders to commit armed forces to the cause of democracy if they believe that their government will face serious repercussions from international bodies such as the International Criminal Court. In addition, forcibly removing a foreign leader would likely violate the international law principle of self-defence and would strike at the core of State sovereignty protected by the UN Charter.