The paper proposes a mechanism explaining how elections may stabilize an autocratic regime even if they are evidently unfree and unfair. Instead of being meaningless rituals, non-democratic elections can help the autocrats in managing and communicating the public information about the regime's...

A rich theoretical literature argues that, in contradiction to the Duverger's law, the plurality voting rule can fail to produce two-party system when voters do not share common information about the electoral situation. We present an empirical operationalization and a series of tests of this...

I develop a novel method to detect election fraud from irregular patterns in the distribution of vote-shares. I build on a widely discussed observation that in some elections where fraud allegations abound, suspiciously many polling stations return coarse vote-shares (e.g., 0.50, 0.60, 0.75) for...

A rich theoretical literature argues that, in contradiction to the Duverger's law, the plurality voting rule can fail to produce two-party system when voters do not share common information about the electoral situation. We present an empirical operationalization and a series of tests of this...

We use plausibly exogenous variation in the availability of Russian analog television signal in Ukraine to study how a media source with a conspicuous political agenda impacts political behavior and attitudes. Using highly granular election data and an original survey we estimate that Russian...

People from specific ethnic, religious, or other externally identifiable groups are often subjected to harsher repression than others. This phenomenon of demographically targeted repression is often viewed as a result of xenophobia. I provide a rationalist explanation of demographic targeting to...

Conventional wisdom says that autocrats manipulate news through censorship. But when it comes to economic affairs -- a highly sensitive topics for modern autocrats -- the government's ability to censor information effectively is limited, because citizens can benchmark the official news against...

The military often intervenes in politics shortly after elections. This might be because election results reveal information about the ease with which a coup can succeed. Would-be coup perpetrators use this information to infer whether the incumbent can be removed from office without provoking...

Ideally, elections should peacefully allocate political power and remove bad leaders from office. We study how the electoral mechanism performs when the government can rig elections by manipulating the electoral process ex ante and by falsifying election returns ex post. The extent to which...