We characterize a ruler's decision of whether to censor media reports that convey public information to citizens who decide whether to revolt. We find: (1) a ruler gains (his ex ante expected payoff increases) by committing to censoring slightly less than he does in equilibrium: his equilibrium...

We define demagogues as anti-establishment politicians who provide simplistic explanations and solutions for the people's problems. We identify two key forms of these simplistic solutions: those that ignore resource constraints and those that blame particular ethnic or cultural groups for...

We characterize a ruler's decision of whether to censor media reports that convey information to citizens who decide whether to revolt. We find: (i) a ruler gains (his ex ante expected payoff increases) by committing to censoring slightly less than he does in equilibrium: his equilibrium...

We provide a framework for analyzing collective action in contentious contexts such as protests or revolutions when individuals are uncertain about the relative payoffs of the status quo and revolution. We model the "calculus of protest" of individuals who must decide whether to submit to the...

We analyze a broad class of binary-action, two-player, coordination games with uncertain payoffs. Players receive private signals about a stochastic payoff that they obtain whenever they both take the "stochastic-coordination action''. The game structure allows a player to exploit the...

Revolutionary vanguards, their radicalism and coercive actions, and their interactions with ordinary citizens and the state are common threads in narratives of revolutionary movements. But what are the defining features of revolutionary vanguards? The literature is replete with terms that allude...