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...

No such detailed analysis is possible in the fifteenth century, since the evidence is not available before 1485. That is why 1485 is such an important date in the history books—not because it heralded any sudden change in social conditions or political thought, but because it marks the beginning in England of political propaganda. The Tudors allowed their motives, or what they wished to be thou...

In work culminating in Know How (2009), Jason Stanley argues, against Gilbert Ryle, that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that. In How Propaganda Works (2015), Stanley portrays this work as undermining a “flawed ideology” supporting elitist valuations of intellectual work and workers. However, the link between Stanley’s two philosophical projects is weak. Ryle’s distinction between knowl...

We study leader election in unidirectional rings of homonym processes that have no a priori knowledge on the number of processes. We show that message-terminating leader election is impossible for any class of rings Kk with bounded multiplicity k ≥ 2. However, we show that process-terminating leader election is possible in the subclass U∗ ∩ Kk, where U ∗ is the class of rings which contain a pr...

A risk-limiting audit is a statistical method to create confidence in the correctness of an election result by checking samples of paper ballots. In order to perform an audit, one usually needs to know what the election margin is, i.e., the number of votes that would need to be changed in order to change the election outcome. In this paper, we present a fully automatic method for computing elec...