How Dictatorships Work

TL;DR: It is argued that digital surveillance resolves dictators’ information problem of not knowing individual citizens’ true anti-regime sentiments and suggests that improvements in governments’ information make citizens worse off in dictatorships.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the causes of authoritarian durability and argue that regimes founded in violent social revolution are especially durable, and they develop and test a theory that accounts for such durability using a novel data set of revolutionary regimes since 1900.

TL;DR: The authors synthesize the literature on the recent rise of populism and discuss economic and cultural consequences of growth in immigration and the recent refugee crisis, and discuss the gap between perceptions and reality regarding immigration.