Состоялось очередное заседание научного семинара "Политическая экономика"

Speaker: Arturas Rozenas ( ISM University of Economics and Management, Vilnius, Lithuania )
Topic: " Forcing Consent: Information and Power in Non-Democratic Elections "

Abstract:
Why do governments hold elections that lack credibility? What explains variation in repression levels across non-democratic elections? While the literature has suggested many explanations for elections in autocracies, it has not yet provided a theory that would explain both the incidence of non-democratic elections and the variation in their degree of competitiveness. 
In this paper, we build an informational model of non-democratic elections explaining when elections may stabilize an autocrat’s rule and when they may fail to do so. We argue that to achieve stability, elections must yield a sufficiently high vote-share for the incumbent and be optimally repressive. The degree of optimal repression is shown to increase with the incumbent’s expected popularity. The model is then applied to explain some stylized facts about non-democratic elections and to derive a set of novel research hypotheses about the effects of non-democratic elections, variation in    electoral repression, and fraud technology. We test the chief implication of the model using an original dataset on political arrests in the Soviet Union. We find that even if elections present no choice, they reduce the expression of anti-government sentiments.

Текст статьи

Заседание состоялось 28 .05.2013 в  18.15   по адресу: г. Москва, улица Шаболовка, дом 26, корпус 4, аудитория   4322.