Does decentralization affect how voters attribute blame for poor economic performance? The question of whether political centralization ties regime leaders to local economic outcomes is particularly important in authoritarian regimes, where economic performance legitimacy is a key source of...

We explore the effect of oil import price shocks on political outcomes using a worldwide dataset on elections of chief executives. Oil import price shocks cause a reduction in the odds of reelection of incumbents, an increase in media chatter about fuel prices, and an increase in non-violent...

Current scholarship on elections in authoritarian regimes has focused on exploring the relationship between elections and democratization, and it has generally used analytical frameworks and methods imported from the study of genuinely democratic elections to do so. These tendencies have kept...

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...