On the eve of a democratization by election, one of the most common forms of transition, dictators can use uncertainty about the future to win political support. We study the evolution of uncertainty from dictatorship to democracy in Chile using text analysis of business communications. We...

State repression is a prominent feature of non-democracies, but its effectiveness in quieting dissent and fostering regime survival remains unclear. We exploit the location of military bases before the coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile in 1973, which is uncorrelated to...