Loyalty Shifts, Containment, and the Tightrope A Theory of How Public Opposition Ends a Regime — or Fails To

Regimes fall when they can no longer reproduce loyalty. They do not all fall when the public stops performing it. This paper models late-authoritarian change as a loyalty-shift process across three layers — mass publics, elites, and security forces. Private preference can move while public ritual holds. That stored gap is containment. A spark can publish the gap through threshold cascades and through costly protest that surprises receivers. What happens next is not a two-path law. Coupled updating across layers produces non-violent transfer: the principal changes, the organization remains. Split updating produces violent rupture. Mass updating without coercive updating produces authoritarian recoupling: the shell is empty of belief and still starts in the morning. External insurance is a signed contract, not a climate. Compact, kin-dense societies bias the repertoire toward the two non-shatter landings; they do not schedule the drop. The identifying comparisons are GDR/Romania 1989 and Tunisia/Syria 2011. Belarus 2020 is the diagnostic anomaly that forced the third landing. The argument is a mechanism, not a uniqueness proof.