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...

Political scientists have long been interested in how indiscriminate violence affects the behavior of its victims, yet most research has focused on short term military consequences rather than long-term political effects. We argue that large scale violence can have an intergenerational impact on...

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...

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...

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...

Under electoral authoritarianism, the opposition's victory at the polls often precipitates regime change. Yet, opposition parties persistently find it difficult to mobilize their supporters. In this study, we examine the effectiveness of information campaigns administered as part of a cluster...

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...

Utilizing over 100 million declassified Red Army personnel records from World War II, we study how state repression shapes soldiers' motivation to exert effort in fighting. Exploiting three complementary identification strategies, we find that soldiers from places with higher levels of pre-war...