We propose a mechanism explaining how elections may legitimize autocratic government even if they are undeniably not free and not fair. We advocate the concept of elections as a mechanism to manipulate public beliefs about the true popularity of an autocratic government. Instead of being...

We propose an extension of the traditional spatial model that combines both programmatic as well as clientelistic modes of electoral vote-seeking. In particular, we model parties that strategically choose (1) their policy position, (2) the effort they devote to clientelism as opposed to the...

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...

Empirical researchers studying party systems often struggle with the question of how to count parties. Indexes of party system fragmentation used to address this problem (e.g., the effective number of parties) have a fundamental shortcoming: since the same index value may represent very...

The paper presents a Bayesian model for estimating ideological ambiguity of political parties from survey data. In the model, policy positions are defined as probability distributions over a policy space and survey-based party placements are treated as random draws from those distributions. A...

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...