We develop an informational theory of dictatorship. Dictators survive not because of their use of force or ideology but …

civic participation, including voting and organizing. In the battle between democracy and dictatorship, democracy has a wide …Across countries, education and democracy are highly correlated. We motivate empirically and then model a causal … potential base of support but offers weak incentives to its defenders. Dictatorship provides stronger incentives to a narrower …

. Perfect democracy, where current members of the government do not have an incumbency advantage or special powers, always leads … to the emergence of the most competent government. However, any deviation from perfect democracy destroys this result … least competent government can persist forever in office. Moreover, a greater degree of democracy may lead to worse …

toward democracy. We also find that assassinations affect the intensity of small-scale conflicts. The results document a …

. However, the introduction of elections and other early trappings of democracy often has the perverse effect of exacerbating … democracy and capitalism--is to move to a governance structure based on impersonal rules that apply in the same way to everyone …

measure this democracy effect. We derive the distribution of the statistic of the democracy effect, and apply the new strategy … under democracy by weighting the behavior of each type of voter by its prevalence in the whole population (and not …. Application of this method to the data in Dal Bó, Foster and Putterman (2010) confirms the presence of the democracy effect in …

's military dictatorship whose rise to power dramatically altered the distribution of power of local political elites. We document … that municipalities that were more politically concentrated prior to the dictatorship in the 1960s are relatively richer in …