The last decade has witnessed growing interest among political scientists and economists in nondemocratic politics. This trend has been reflected in increasingly rigorous game-theoretic modeling of its various aspects: regime persistence and breakdown; ruling-coalition formation and leadership...

We develop a model of reform and rebellion to explore Alexis de Tocqueville's conjecture that reform provokes political unrest. Our theory emphasizes that reform often must be implemented by local actors with a stake in the status quo. In this setting, the promise of reform represents an...

Despite the absence of formal institutions to constrain opportunistic behavior, some autocracies successfully attract private investment. Prior work explains such success by the relative size of the autocrat's winning coalition or the existence of legislatures. We advance on this understanding...

Public policy may be determined as much by what cannot be agreed to by politicians and organized interests as by what can. Focusing on the inability of organized groups to credibly promise that their members will fully report revenues to tax authorities, I develop an incomplete-contracts...

I explore the incentives under alternative electoral institutions for national politicians to efficiently provide local public goods. Using a career-concerns models which incorporates voter ideological heterogeneity and thus allows comparison of electoral-college and majoritarian elections at...

I reexamine Hirschman's classic text Exit, Voice, and Loyalty through a game-theoretic interpretation of the relationship between exit and voice. The model, which is general and applicable to diverse environments, treats exit as a costly decision which may be prevented through an appropriate...