Online Social Media and Political Awareness in Authoritarian Regimes

Judicial Empowerment in Authoritarian Regimes

Modeling authoritarian regimes

In the past few years, a body of ideas based on political economy theory has been built up by North and Weingast, Olson, Przeworski, and Acemoglu and Robinson. One theme that emerges from this literature concerns the transition to democracy: why would dominant elites give up oligarchic power? This article addresses this question by considering a formal model of an authoritarian regime, and then...

Information Manipulation and Reform in Authoritarian Regimes*

We develop a theory of how an authoritarian regime interactively uses information manipulation, such as propaganda or censorship, and policy improvement to maintain social stability. The government can depict the status quo policy more popularly supported than it actually is, while at the same time please citizens directly by enacting a costly reform. We show that the government’s ability of ma...

Social media and online political discussion: The effect of cues and informational cascades on participation in online political communities

This study examines, through a content analysis of the census of news stories posted in a Colombian online political community, how status cues and informational cascades shape participation in online political discussions. Specifically, it looks at how the authors’ news stories posting increase rate, the number of news story sources, the velocity at which comments to a news story start to appe...

Sources of Corruption in Authoritarian Regimes

Objectives. We seek to investigate the determinants of corruption in authoritarian polities. We hypothesize that corruption in nondemocratic settings will be greater where the ruling group is personalistic rather than a political party or a military clique and that it will be greater where rulers expect to remain in power longer. We construct a new operationalization of the selectorate theory a...