The possibility of treason by a close associate has been a nightmare of most autocrats throughout history. More competent viziers are better able to discriminate among potential plotters, and this makes them more risky subordinates for the ruler. To avoid this, rulers, especially those which are weak and vulnerable, sacrifice the competence of their agents, hiring mediocre but loyal subordinates. Furthermore, any use of incentive schemes by a personalistic dictator is limited by the fact that all punishments are conditional on the dictator's own survival. We endogenize loyalty and competence in a principal-agent game between a dictator and his viziers in both static and dynamic settings. The dynamic model allows us to focus on the succession problem that insecure dictators face.

Every dictator dislikes free media. Yet, many non-democratic countries have partially free or almost free media. In this paper, we develop a theory of media freedom in dictatorships and provide systematic statistical evidence in support of this theory. In our model, free media allow a dictator to provide incentives to bureaucrats and therefore to improve the quality of government. The importance of this benefit varies with the natural-resource endowment. In resource-rich countries, bureaucratic incentives are less important for the dictator; hence, media freedom is less likely to emerge. Using panel data, we show that controlling for country fixed effects, media are less free in oil-rich economies, with the effect especially pronounced in non-democratic regimes. These results are robust to model specification and the inclusion of various controls, including economic development, democracy, country size, size of government, and others.

Although almost half of the world's population lives under nondemocratic regimes, the questions of how policy decisions are made and how power changes hands in nondemocracies have received relatively little attention in the political economy literature. Gordon Tullock (1987) suggested that because there are no strong institutions ensuring consensus and regulating the election and succession of leaders, non-democratic regimes rapidly degenerate into personal rule, where a single dictator dominates every aspect of decision-making. In this paper, we draw on our work on dynamic coalition formation and investigate Tullock's conjecture formally. Our game-theoretic analysis leads to the opposite of Tullock's conjecture: provided that players are sufficiently forward-looking, juntas do not dynamically converge to personal rule. On the contrary, relatively large juntas may emerge and persist as ruling coalitions for a very simple and intuitive reason: the absence of strong institutions not only enables some junta members to eliminate others, but also implies that current members cannot make credible commitments and in particular cannot refrain from engaging in further rounds of elimination.

We study the formation of a ruling coalition in nondemocratic societies where institutions do not enable political commitments. Each individual is endowed with a level of political power. The ruling coalition consists of a subset of the individuals in the society and decides the distribution of resources. A ruling coalition needs to contain enough powerful members to win against any alternative coalition that may challenge it and it needs to be self-enforcing, in the sense that none of its subcoalitions should be able to secede and become the new ruling coalition. We present both an axiomatic approach that captures these notions and determines a (generically) unique ruling coalition and the analysis of a dynamic game of coalition formation that encompasses these ideas. We establish that the subgame perfect equilibria of the coalition formation game coincide with the set of ruling coalitions resulting from the axiomatic approach. A key insight of our analysis is that a coalition is made self-enforcing by the failure of its winning subcoalitions to be self-enforcing. This is most simply illustrated by the following example: with majority rule, two-person coalitions are generically not self-enforcing and consequently, three-person coalitions are self-enforcing (unless one player is disproportionately powerful). We also characterize the structure of ruling coalitions. For example, we determine the conditions under which ruling coalitions are robust to small changes in the distribution of power and when they are fragile. We also show that when the distribution of power across individuals is relatively equal and there is majoritarian voting, only certain sizes of coalitions (e.g., with majority rule, coalitions of size 3, 7, 15, 31, etc.) can be the ruling coalition.

This paper investigates delegating decision-making to an informed agent with bureaucratic procedural rules. We assume that these rules are purely wasteful and refer to them as money burning. We show that the optimal delegation contract can involve money burning, both when contingent monetary transfers are not possible (as in most of the delegation literature), and when contingent transfers are allowed, but payments from the principal to the agent are bounded from below. We establish some general properties of the optimal contract with money burning, and show that under certain regularity conditions the contract imposes zero money burning in low states, and that the amount of money burning is continuous and increasing in the state. The regularity conditions also imply that the implemented action is always between the ideal points of the principal and the agent. We explicitly solve for the optimal contract in a class of models with quadratic loss functions, and investigate how the contract changes as the choice of action becomes more important to the principal than to the agent, in monetary terms. We also investigate features of the optimal contract in cases when the regularity conditions do not hold. In the case when both transfers and monetary transfers are allowed, we show that whether the optimal contract involves inefficiencies and money burning depends on the outside option of the agent, relative to the required minimum wage.

Populism is often described as an ideology which contrasts the interests of majority of the population and the elite. In reality, populist politicians are often seen conducting policies which only the poorest of their voters benefit from. In this paper, we explain why even a moderate leftist politician seeking reelection may choose leftist policies. In short, the explanation we suggest is signaling. When the voters have only noisy information about the policy chosen by the incumbent, the latter has an incentive to bias his policy to the left of his ideal point. We show that the leftist bias is higher when the polarization is high or when most of the politics is occupied by representatives of the elite, phenomena which are more likely to be observed in young democracies than in mature ones. We also investigate under what conditions bribes by the elite will reduce the leftist bias of the politician.

Democratic elections are often argued to both allow the aggregation of information and preferences of heterogenous voters and to provide an effective means of holding politicians accountable. This paper studies how heterogeneity of voter preferences affects political accountability. I introduce a common agency model, with voters as principals and the politician as the agent, and multiple policy dimensions. I characterize the equilibria in this model and identify several new effects resulting from the heterogeneity in voters' preferences. First, there is a non-monotonic effect of transparency on political accountability, in the sense that greater precision of information on the politician's performance first increases effectiveness of electoral controls, but then discourages the politician's effort. With very limited transparency, voters are unable to provide incentives to the politician. However, if information is too precise, the politician can target a narrow group of voters while strategically ignoring the rest. Second, the model also implies that small groups may be more successful in inducing politicians to choose policies in line with their preferences and provides a novel mechanism for the underprovision of public goods, whereby voters who equally care about a public good may nonetheless fail to induce the politician to provide it. Finally, conditions, under which delegation of voting makes the politician more accountable, are identified.

The winner of a battle for a throne can either execute or spare the loser; if the loser is spared, he contends the throne in the next period. Executing the losing contender gives the winner an additional quiet period, but then his life is at risk if he loses to some future contender who might be, in equilibrium, too frightened to spare him. The trade-off is analyzed within a dynamic complete information game, with, potentially, an infinite number of long-term players. Decisions to execute predecessors are history-dependent. With a dynastic rule in place, incentives to kill the predecessor are much higher than in non-hereditary dictatorships. The historical part of our analytic narrative contains a detailed analysis of two types of non-democratic succession: hereditary rule of the Osmanli dynasty in the Ottoman Empire in 1281-1922, and non-hereditary military dictatorships in Venezuela in 1830-1964.

We propose two related equilibrium refinements for voting and agenda-setting games, Sequentially Weakly Undominated Equilibrium (SWUE) and Markov Trembling Hand Perfect Equilibrium (MTHPE), and show how these equilibrium concepts eliminate non-intuitive equilibria that arise naturally in dynamic voting games and games in which random or deterministic sequence of agenda setters make offers to several players. We establish existence of these equilibria in finite and infinite (for MTHPE) games, provide a characterization of the structure of equilibria, and clarify the relationship between the two concepts. Finally, we show how these concepts can be applied in a dynamic model of endogenous club formation.

We study dynamic selection of governments under different political institutions, with a special focus on institutional “flexibility.” A government consists of a subset of the individuals in the society. The competence level of the government in office determines collective utilities (e.g., by determining the amount and quality of public goods), and each individual derives additional utility from being part of the government (e.g., corruption or rents from holding office). We characterize dynamic evolution of governments and determine the structure of stable governments, which arise and persist in equilibrium. Perfect democracy, where current members of the government do not have an incumbency advantage or special powers, always leads to the emergencies of the most competent government. However, any deviation from perfect democracy destroys this result. There is always at least one other, less competent government that is also stable and can persist forever, and even the least competent government can persist forever in office. Moreover, a greater degree of democracy may lead to worse governments. In contrast, in the presence of stochastic shocks or changes in the environment, greater democracy corresponds to greater flexibility and increases the probability that high competence governments will come to power. This result suggests that a particular advantage of democratic regimes may be their greater adaptability to changes rather than their performance under given conditions. Finally, we show that, in the presence of stochastic shocks, “royalty-like” dictatorships may be more successful than “junta-like” dictatorships, because they might also be more adaptable to change.

A central feature of dynamic collective decision-making is that the rules that govern the procedures for future decision-making and the distribution of political power across players are determined by current decisions. For example, current constitutional change must take into account how the new constitution may pave the way for further changes in laws and regulations. We develop a general framework for the analysis of this class of dynamic problems. Under relatively natural acyclicity assumptions, we provide a complete characterization of dynamically stable states as functions of the initial state and determine conditions for their uniqueness. We show how this framework can be applied in political economy, coalition formation, and the analysis of the dynamics of clubs. The explicit characterization we provide highlights two intuitive features of dynamic collective decision-making: (1) a social arrangement is made stable by the instability of alternative arrangements that are preferred by sufficiently many members of the society; (2) efficiency-enhancing changes are often resisted because of further social changes that they will engender.