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

We develop an informational theory of autocracy. Dictators survive not by means of force or
ideology but because they convince the public—rightly or wrongly—that they are competent …

We present a formal model of government control of the media to illuminate variation in
media freedom across countries and over time. Media bias is greater and state ownership of …

Bureaucratic compliance is often crucial for political survival, yet eliciting that compliance in
weakly institutionalized environments requires that political principals convince agents that …

State repression is a common tool used by autocrats, and to understand how the
implementation of repression unfolds, I develop a theory with two key features. First …

Contemporary models of political economy suggest that reforms intended to reduce
grievances should curtail unrest, a perspective at odds with many traditional accounts of …

The central puzzle of persuasion is why a receiver would listen to a sender who they know is
trying to change their beliefs or behavior. This article summarizes five approaches to solving …

We explore the relationship between capacity for collective action and representation in
autocracies with data from Imperial Russia. Our primary empirical exercise relates peasant …

Transitional justice-the act of reckoning with a former authoritarian regime after it has ceased
to exist-has direct implications for democratic processes. Mechanisms of transitional justice …

To explain trade policies, a large literature draws on domestic institutions. Institutions that
are more responsive to narrow-interest groups are expected to succumb to protectionist …