We study a model of the rise and fall of illiberal democracies. Voters value both liberty and economic security. In times of crisis, voters may prefer to elect an illiberal government that, by violating constitutional constraints, offers greater economic security but less liberty. However,...

We propose a mechanism linking legislative gridlock to voters’ support for candidates who hold extreme policy positions. Moderate voters rationally discount extreme pol- icy proposals from co-partisans on gridlocked policy issues because on these issues policy change is unlikely. We test our...

We study a model of popular demand for anti-elite populist reforms that drain the swamp: replace experienced public servants with novices that will only acquire experience with time. Voters benefit from experienced public servants because they are more effective at delivering public goods and...

We present a unified duality approach to Bayesian persuasion. The optimal dual variable, interpreted as a price function on the state space, is shown to be a supergradient of the concave closure of the objective function at the prior belief. Strong duality holds when the objective function is...

In persuasion problems where the receiver’s action is one-dimensional and his utility is single-peaked, optimal signals are characterized by duality, based on a first-order approach to the receiver’s problem. A signal is optimal iff the induced joint distribution over states and actions is...

In the United States, the boundaries of congressional districts are often drawn by political partisans. In the resulting partisan gerrymandering problem, a designer partitions voters into equal-sized districts with the goal of winning as many districts as possible. When the designer can...

We consider a standard persuasion problem in which the receiver’s action and the state of the world are both one-dimensional. Fully characterizing optimal signals when utilities are non-linear is a daunting task. Instead, we develop a general approach to understanding a key qualitative...