A school may improve its students' job outcomes if it issues only coarse grades. Google can
reduce congestion on roads by giving drivers noisy information about the state of traffic. A …

The last decade has witnessed growing interest among political scientists and economists in
nondemocratic politics. This trend has been reflected in increasingly rigorous game …

Shelter-in-place ordinances were the first wide-spread policy measures aimed to mitigate
the spread of COVID-19. Compliance with shelter-in-place directives is individually costly …

As authoritarian governments around the world develop sophisticated technologies for
controlling information, many observers have predicted that these controls would be …

Dictatorship is not what it was once. Military and single-party regimes have been withering
away. Today, most dictators organize multiparty elections. The Politics of Uncertainty …

While it is often assumed that authoritarian regimes inevitably fear and restrict media
independence, permitting watchdog journalism can actually help such regimes maintain …

Media censorship is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. We conduct a field experiment in
China to measure the effects of providing citizens with access to an uncensored internet. We …

How do the media affect public support for democratic institutions in a fragile democracy?
What role do they play in a dictatorial regime? We study these questions in the context of …

We propose a novel explanation for the most prevalent form of democratic breakdown after
the end of the Cold War: the subversion of democracy by incumbents. In the classics of …

Authoritarian governments often impose crude and heavy-handed propaganda messages
on society. Is such hard propaganda effective in sustaining authoritarian rule? With an …