North Korea is perceived by many as one of the most totalitarian societies of modern time. But in the wake of the economic collapse of the 1990s, North Korean totalitarianism has grappled with new conditions. This paper examines how the country's totalitarian character has been upheld through...

The problem of credible commitment dogs every government, whether democratic or authoritarian. Governments that have sufficient power to begin a project can often change their minds. Paradoxically, such omnipotence can be crippling. If lenders cannot be assured that a current mayor’s...

Non-democracies are seen as inherently unstable because of the high frequency of irregular and often-violent leadership turnovers. Our tractable stochastic game model investigates authoritarian stability and instability by portraying a world in which dictators are forced to tolerate threatening...

We survey recent theoretical and empirical literature on political economics of non-democracies. Nondemocratic regimes face multiple challenges to their rule, both internal, such as palace coups or breakdown of their support coalition, and external, such as mass protests or revolutions. We...

Traditional point views the success of coup as the shifting of focal point from supporting dictator to supporting coup plotter, which cannot be rationalized. When we look at coup's micro-process, we find that it is rationalizable. In this paper, I propose a model of coup with unique sub-game...