Georgy Egorov

Many dictatorships end up with a series of disastrous decisions such as Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union or Saddam Hussein's aggression against Kuwait. Even if a certain policy choice is not ultimately fatal for the regime, such as Mao's Big Leap Forward or the Pol Pot's collectivization drive, they typically involve both a miscalculation by the leadership and an institutional environment in which better informed subordinates have no chance to prevent the decision from being implemented. We offer a dynamic model of nondemocratic politics in which repression and bad decision making are self-reinforcing. Repression reduces the immediate threat to the regime, yet raises future stakes for the dictator; with higher stakes, the dictator puts more emphasis on loyalty than competence, which in turn increases the probability of a wrong policy choice. Our theory offers an explanation of how rational dictators end up in an informational bubble even in highly institutionalized regimes.

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 analyze strategic decisions made by dictators from the standpoint of maximizing the chances of regime survival in the light of these challenges, and show how it explains multiple common patterns, from hiring political loyalists to positions that require competence, to restricting media freedom at the cost of sacrificing bureaucratic efficiency, to running propaganda campaigns, organizing election fraud, purging opponents and associates, and repressing citizens.

Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of a democratic system, but elections are common in other regimes as well. Such an election might be a pure farce, with the incumbents getting close to 100% of the vote. In other instances, incumbents allow opposition candidates to be on the ballot and run campaigns, limit electoral fraud, e.g., by inviting international observers, all to make elections appear fair. In our model, the incumbent is informed about his popularity, and having a fair election allows him to signal his popularity to the people. After casting their vote, heterogeneous citizens decide whether or not to participate in a protest, and they are more willing to do so if they expect others to protest as well. We demonstrate theoretically that regimes that have a high level of elite repression are less likely to have fair elections, but regimes with a high cost of protesting for ordinary citizens make fair elections more likely.

In this essay, we provide a simple conceptual framework to elucidate the forces that lead to institutional persistence and change. Our framework is based on a dynamic game between different groups, who care both about current policies and institutions and future policies, which are themselves determined by current institutional choices, and clarifies the forces that lead to the most extreme form of institutional persistence ("institutional stasis") and the potential drivers of institutional change. We further study the strategic stability of institutions, which arises when institutions persist because of fear of subsequent, less beneficial changes that would follow initial reforms. More importantly, we emphasize that, despite the popularity of ideas based on institutional stasis in the economics and political science literatures, most institutions are in a constant state of flux, but their trajectory may still be shaped by past institutional choices, thus exhibiting "path-dependent change," so that initial conditions determine both the subsequent trajectories of institutions and how they respond to shocks. We conclude the essay by discussing how institutions can be designed to bolster stability, the relationship between social mobility and institutions, and the interplay between culture and institutions.

An influential thesis often associated with de Tocqueville views social mobility as a bulwark of democracy: when members of a social group expect to join the ranks of other social groups in the near future, they should have less reason to exclude these other groups from the political process. In this article, we investigate this hypothesis using a dynamic model of political economy. As well as formalizing this argument, our model demonstrates its limits, elucidating a robust theoretical force making democracy less stable in societies with high social mobility: when the median voter expects to move up (respectively down), she would prefer to give less voice to poorer (respectively richer) social groups. Our theoretical analysis shows that in the presence of social mobility, the political preferences of an individual depend on the potentially conflicting preferences of her “future selves,” and that the evolution of institutions is determined through the implicit interaction between occupants of the same social niche at different points in time.

We provide a general framework for the analysis of institutional dynamics in an environment in which payoffs and political powers change stochastically. Assuming that economic and political institutions as well as individual types can be ordered, and preferences and the distribution of political power satisfy natural “single-crossing” (increasing differences) conditions, we prove existence of a pure-strategy Markov voting equilibrium, provide conditions for its uniqueness, and present a number of comparative static results. We then use this framework to study the dynamics of political rights and repression in the presence of threats from extremist groups and the dynamics of collective experimentation.

In dynamic collective decision making, current decisions determine the future distribution of political power and influence future decisions. We develop a general framework to study this class of problems. Under acyclicity, we characterize dynamically stable states as functions of the initial state and obtain two general insights. First, a social arrangement is made stable by the instability of alternative arrangements that are preferred by sufficiently powerful groups. Second, efficiency-enhancing changes may be resisted because of further changes they will engender. We use this framework to analyze dynamics of political rights in a society with different types of extremist views.

Almost all democratic societies evolved socially and politically out of authoritarian and nondemocratic regimes. These changes not only altered the allocation of economic resources in society but also the structure of political power. In this paper, we develop a framework for studying the dynamics of political and social change. The society consists of agents that care about current and future social arrangements and economic allocations; allocation of political power determines who has the capacity to implement changes in economic allocations and future allocations of power. The set of available social rules and allocations at any point in time is stochastic. We show that political and social change may happen without any stochastic shocks or as a result of a shock destabilizing an otherwise stable social arrangement. Crucially, the process of social change is contingent (and history-dependent): the timing and sequence of stochastic events determine the long-run equilibrium social arrangements. For example, the extent of democratization may depend on how early uncertainty about the set of feasible reforms in the future is resolved.

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 a chance to rule uncontested for a while, 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. In an equilibrium, decisions to execute predecessors depend on the predecessors' history of executions. With a dynastic rule in place, incentives to kill the predecessor are much higher than in non-hereditary dictatorships. The historical illustration for our analysis contains a discussion of post-World War II politics of execution of deposed leaders and detailed discussion of non-hereditary military dictatorships in Venezuela in 1830-1964, which witnessed dozens of comebacks and no single political execution.

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 who 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 nondemocratic countries have partially free or almost free media. In this article, 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 nondemocratic regimes. These results are robust to model specification and the inclusion of various controls, including the level of economic development, democracy, country size, size of government, and others.

We study the formation of a ruling coalition in non-democratic 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 1, 3, 7, 15, etc.) can be the ruling coalition.

We study the effect of social media on xenophobic attitudes in Russia. We build a model where social media increases the likelihood of meeting like-minded people locally and in other cities, and where online interactions can be persuasive. We show that social media increases the share of individuals holding extreme opinions, but it may also increase the share of people hiding these opinions, which calls for proper measurement of attitudes. Empirically, we confirm these predictions by combining data from a survey experiment with data on hate crimes and exploiting quasi-exogenous variation in city-level social media penetration in Russia. We find that higher city-level social media exposure: i) increased the share of individuals holding xenophobic attitudes (consistent with a persuasion mechanism); ii) reduced people's willingness to openly express xenophobia (consistent with a social image mechanism); iii) led to more hate crimes in cities with higher pre-existing levels of nationalism (consistent with a mechanism of connecting like-minded people locally, thus facilitating the coordination of collective action).

Dissent plays an important role in any society, but dissenters are often silenced through social sanctions. Beyond their persuasive effects, rationales providing arguments supporting dissenters' causes can increase the public expression of dissent by providing a ``social cover'' for voicing otherwise-stigmatized positions. Motivated by a simple theoretical framework, we experimentally show that liberals are more willing to post a Tweet opposing the movement to defund the police, are seen as less prejudiced, and face lower social sanctions when their Tweet implies they had first read credible scientific evidence supporting their position. Analogous experiments with conservatives demonstrate that the same mechanisms facilitate anti-immigrant expression. Our findings highlight both the power of rationales and their limitations in enabling dissent and shed light on phenomena such as social movements, political correctness, propaganda, and anti-minority behavior.

Economic crises are often accompanied by waves of antiminority behavior. We build on the framework developed in Bursztyn et al. (2022) to propose that crises, in addition to shifting people's attitudes toward minorities, can provide intolerant people with a plausible rationale for expressing their preexisting prejudice. The availability of such a rationale thus increases antiminority behavior by reducing the associated social sanctions. In an experiment examining how economic crises affect social inference about the motives underlying xenophobic behavior, we find that crises lead respondents to ascribe antiminority behavior to economic concerns rather than to innate xenophobia.

This paper studies how ethnic diversity affects willingness to self-isolate during a public-health crisis. The results suggest that social fragmentation can weaken the collective behavior needed for effective distancing.

Social norms, usually persistent, can change quickly when new public information arrives, such as a surprising election outcome. People may become more inclined to express views or take actions previously perceived as stigmatized and may judge others less negatively for doing so. We examine this possibility using two experiments. We first show via revealed preference experiments that Donald Trump's rise in popularity and eventual victory increased individuals' willingness to publicly express xenophobic views. We then show that individuals are sanctioned less negatively if they publicly expressed a xenophobic view in an environment where that view is more popular.

We model and test two school-based peer cultures: one that stigmatizes effort and one that rewards ability. The model shows that either may reduce participation in educational activities when peers can observe participation and performance. We design a field experiment that allows us to test for, and differentiate between, these two concerns. We find that peer pressure reduces takeup of an SAT prep package virtually identically across two very different high school settings. However, the effects arise from very distinct mechanisms: a desire to hide effort in one setting and a desire to hide low ability in the other.

In turbulent times, political labels become increasingly uninformative about politicians' true policy preferences or their ability to withstand the influence of special interest groups. We offer a model in which politicians use campaign rhetoric to signal their political preferences in multiple dimensions. In equilibrium, the less popular types try to pool with the more popular ones, whereas the more popular types seek to separate themselves. The ability of voters to process information shapes politicians' campaign rhetoric. If the signals on the cultural dimension are more precise, politicians signal more there, even if the economy is more important to voters. The unpopular type benefits from increased conformity, which bridges the candidates' rhetoric and makes it more difficult for voters to make an informed decision.

One frequently overlooked aspect of the U.S.-style electoral college system is that it discourages election fraud. In a presidential election based on popular vote, competing parties are motivated to manipulate votes in areas where they have the most significant influence, such as states where they control local executive offices, legislatures, and the judiciary. With the electoral college, the incentives for fraud shift to swing states where the local government is politically divided, and fraud is therefore more difficult and riskier. An increase in polarization makes fraud more likely but does not affect the fraud-protection advantage of the electoral college. Similarly, the single-member district electoral system provides better protection against election fraud than proportional representation.

Why do political campaigns so often yield unexpected results? We address this question by separately estimating the direct effect of a campaign on targeted voters and the indirect effect on others in the same social environment. Partnering with a local NGO during Argentina's 2023 presidential election, we randomized the distribution of leaflets providing an expert assessment of the likely consequences of certain proposals by the outsider candidate Javier Milei. Exploiting Argentina's unique sub-precinct election reporting system, we show that the campaign reduced Milei's support among directly treated voters, as expected, but increased his support among untreated voters in treated precincts, producing a backfiring, net-positive effect for Milei. A pre-registered replication confirmed these opposite-signed effects. Using theory and a survey experiment, we show that the minority of voters who disbelieved the campaign were more motivated to discuss it with peers, convincing them to support Milei. This mobilization effect appears especially likely when campaigns criticize outsider candidates. Our results highlight how campaigns aimed at anti-elite candidates can unintentionally mobilize support for them.

Public regulation is increasingly facing competition from “private politics” in the form of activism and corporate self-regulation. However, its effectiveness, welfare consequences, and interaction with public regulation are poorly understood. This article presents a unified dynamic framework for studying the interaction between public regulation, self-regulation, and boycotts. We show that the possibility of self-regulation saves on administrative costs, but also leads to delays. Without an active regulator, firms self-regulate to preempt or end a boycott and private politics is beneficial for activists but harmful for firms. With an active regulator, in contrast, firms self-regulate to preempt public regulation and private politics is harmful for activists but beneficial for firms. Our analysis generates a rich set of testable predictions that are consistent with the rise of private politics over time and the fact that there is more self-regulation and activism in the U.S., while public regulation continues to be more common in Europe.

It is often argued that additional constraints on redistribution such as granting veto power to more players in society better protects property from expropriation. We use a model of multilateral bargaining to demonstrate that this intuition may be flawed. Increasing the number of veto players or raising the supermajority requirement for redistribution may reduce protection on the equilibrium path. The reason is the existence of two distinct mechanisms of property protection. One is formal constraints that allow individuals or groups to block any redistribution that is not in their favor. The other occurs in equilibrium where players without such powers protect each other from redistribution. Players without formal veto power anticipate that the expropriation of other similar players will ultimately hurt them and thus combine their influence to prevent redistributions. In a stable allocation, the society exhibits a “class” structure with class members having equal wealth and strategically protecting each other from redistribution.

Voters commonly face a choice between competent candidates and those with policy preferences similar to their own. This article explores how electoral rules, such as district magnitude, mediate this trade-off and affect the composition of representative bodies and the quality of policy outcomes. We show formally that anticipation of bargaining over policy causes voters in elections with multiple single-member districts to prefer candidates with polarized policy positions over more competent candidates. Results from a unique field experiment in Afghanistan are consistent with these predictions. Specifically, representatives selected by elections with a single multi-member district are better educated and exhibit less extreme policy preferences.

When voters fear that politicians may be influenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of integrity are valuable. As a consequence, an honest politician seeking reelection chooses “populist” policies—that is, policies to the left of the median voter—as a way of signaling that he is not beholden to the interests of the right. Politicians that are influenced by right-wing special interests respond by choosing moderate or even left-of-center policies. This populist bias of policy is greater when the value of remaining in office is higher for the politician; when there is greater polarization between the policy preferences of the median voter and right-wing special interests; when politicians are perceived as more likely to be corrupt; when there is an intermediate amount of noise in the information that voters receive; when politicians are more forward-looking; and when there is greater uncertainty about the type of the incumbent. We also show that soft term limits may exacerbate, rather than reduce, the populist bias of policies.

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., rents from holding office). We characterize the dynamic evolution of governments and determine the structure of stable governments, which arise and persist in equilibrium. In our model, perfect democracy, where current members of the government do not have veto power over changes in governments, always leads to the emergence of the most competent government. However, any deviation from perfect democracy, to any regime with incumbency veto power, 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. We also show that there is a nonmonotonic relationship between the degree of incumbency veto power and the quality of government. In contrast, in the presence of stochastic shocks or changes in the environment, a regime with less incumbency veto power has greater flexibility and greater probability that high-competence governments will come to power. This result suggests that a particular advantage of “democratic regimes” (with a limited number of veto players) may be their greater adaptability to changes rather than their performance under given conditions. Finally, we show that “royalty-like” dictatorships may be more successful than “junta-like” dictatorships because in these regimes veto players are less afraid of change.

In most elections, voters care about several issues, but candidates may have to choose only a few on which to build their campaign. The information that voters will get about the politician depends on this choice, and it is therefore a strategic one. In this paper, I study a model of elections where voters care about the candidates' competences (or positions) over two issues, e.g., the economy and foreign policy, but each candidate may only credibly signal his competence or announce his position on at most one issue. Voters are assumed to get (weakly) better information if the candidates campaign on the same issue rather than on different ones. I show that the first mover will, in equilibrium, set the agenda for both himself and the opponent if campaigning on a different issue is uninformative, but otherwise the other candidate may actually be more likely to choose the other issue. The social (voters') welfare is a non-monotone function of the informativeness of different-issue campaigns, but in any case the voters are better off if candidates are free to pick an issue rather than if an issue is set by exogenous events or by voters. If the first mover is able to reconsider his choice when the follower picks a different issue, then politicians who are very competent on both issues will switch. If voters have superior information on a politician's credentials on one of the issues, that politician is more likely to campaign on another issue. If voters care about one issue more than the other, the politicians are more likely to campaign on the more important issue. If politicians are able to advertise on both issues, at a cost, then the most competent and well-rounded ones will do so. This possibility makes voters better informed and better off, but has an ambiguous effect on politicians' utility. The model and the results may help understand endogenous selection of issues in political campaigns and the dynamics of these decisions.

A receiver wants to learn multidimensional information from a sender, and she has the capacity to verify just one dimension. The sender's payoff depends on the belief he induces, via an exogenously given monotone function. We show that by using a randomized verification strategy, the receiver can learn the sender's information fully in many cases. We characterize exactly when it is possible to do so. In particular, when the exogenous payoff function is submodular, we can explicitly describe a full-learning mechanism; when it is (strictly) supermodular, full learning is not possible. In leading cases where full learning is possible, it can be attained using an indirect mechanism in which the sender chooses the probability of verifying each dimension.

In many contracting settings, actions costly to one party but with no direct benefits to the other (money-burning) may be part of the explicit or implicit contract. A leading example is bureaucratic procedures in an employer-employee relationship. We study a model of delegation with an informed agent, where the principal may impose money-burning on the agent as a function of the agent's choice of action, and show that money-burning may be part of the optimal contract. This result holds even if action-contingent monetary transfers are possible, as long as transfers from the principal to the agent are bounded from below (as in limited liability or minimal wage requirements). In fact, the optimal contract can involve a combination of both efficient monetary incentives and inefficient nonmonetary incentives through money burning. Our model delivers some results novel to the delegation literature. First, money-burning is more likely if the principal is more "sensitive" to the choice of action than the agent. This is consistent with the perception that there is more bureaucratization in large organizations. Second, money-burning is more likely if the agent's limited liability constraint is tighter relative to his participation constraint. This implies that a higher minimum wage distorts employment contracts towards using socially wasteful nonmonetary incentives, leading to a Pareto inferior outcome as the agent is still held down to his reservation value through increased money burning.

This comment corrects two results in the 2006 Econometrica paper by Amador, Werning, and Angeletos (AWA), that features a model in which individuals face a trade-off between flexibility and commitment. First, in contrast to Proposition 1 in AWA, we show that money-burning can be part of the ex ante optimal contract when there are two states. Second, in contrast to Proposition 2 in AWA, we show that money-burning can be imposed at the top (in the highest liquidity shock state), even when there is a continuum of states. We provide corrected versions of the above results.