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...

Election monitoring has become a key instrument of democracy promotion. Election monitors routinely expect to deter fraud and prevent post-election violence, but in reality post-election violence often increases when monitors do expose fraud. We argue that monitors can make all elections less...

We develop a model where the speaker obtains information about which they can lie to persuade the audience. The option to lie, when exercised on the equilibrium path, incentivizes the speaker to seek more persuasive information. However, the conditions under which this happens are surprisingly...

It is widely agreed that durable authoritarian rule requires power-sharing institutions. But how do autocrats rule under such institutions? We analyze formally how an autocrat distributes information inside the coalition to preserve and consolidate power while remaining constrained by the...