Influential recent scholarship assumes that authoritarian rulers act as perfect agents of economic elites, foreclosing the possibility that economic elites may at times prefer democracy absent a popular threat from below. Motivated by a puzzling set of democratic transitions, we relax this...

Why do some former authoritarian elites return to power after democratization through reelection or re-appointment to political office, or by assuming board positions in state-owned or major private enterprises, whereas others do not and still others face punishment? This paper investigates this...

Despite received wisdom that long time horizons and formal institutions can induce private investment under dictatorship, there is substantial investment even in relatively unconstrained regimes. This paper provides a novel explanation for the puzzle of investment in these regimes: economic...

Most scholarship concludes that major redistributive programs garner support for incumbents. But redistribution can backfire when incumbents lose office and have issue ownership without control and when local program saturation is low, generating grievances. This becomes apparent when analyzing...

A growing literature concludes that modern democracies have not adopted policies that benefit the majority to the extent predicted by social conflict theory. The most prominent reason is that globalization ties the hands of policymakers, making it hard for them to redistribute. Yet while...

Patchiness in rural development remains a salient feature of many developed and developing countries that have struggled historically to overcome enormous national disparities in economic structure and well-being. This paper examines how one major, explicit rural policy ostensibly aimed at rural...

Many authoritarian regimes around the world use policy-based strategies of social control in lieu of more coercive tools like repression. When these regimes fall to democracy, do authoritarian successors pay a political price for these policies? This paper examines the political cost of one...

"José swung the gate open, hopped back into the bed of the truck, and tapped the window to the cab gently with the butt of his rifle. Iván cut the headlights and put the truck in gear. We inched forward along the bumpy road that carved through the broad southern Venezuelan plains, the dust...