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...

In previous chapters, we discussed the contextual factors that affect the development of political systems. However, the evolution of political systems is not merely a function of the economic, social, cultural, and international environments. Political democracy is also as much a product of human choices as it is a product of context, particularly the choice of institutions that help shape the...

Electoral systems are complex entities composed of a set of phases that form a process to which performance parameters can be associated. One of the key points of every electoral system is represented by the electoral formula that can be characterized by a wide spectrum of properties that, according to Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem and other theoretical results, cannot be all satisfied at the s...

The old, understudied electoral system composed of multi-member districts, open ballot and plurality rule is presented as the most remote scene of the origin of both political parties and new electoral systems. A survey of the uses of this set of electoral rules in different parts of the world during remote and recent periods shows its wide spread. A model of voting by this electoral system dem...